[devn00b]

In my experience there are several bottlenecks that have to be looked at when considering things. Ram size, cpu power, and also router.

1st two for obvious reasons. The router is rather important, most normal home routers just cant handle the # of connections required for large servers, Guildwars had this problem.

While you can run a server with a few zones on a p3 or hell maybe a p2 you wont be able to have too many zones open the cpu just wont keep up.