Can you(r network card) handle it?
Raymond Chen talks about how the real acid test for a Network Card, back in 1996, was to put it on the Microsoft Corporate Network and see if it could deal with the traffic without dropping packets.
It’s more true today. I had to use a packet-sniffer recently to sniff out the exact SOAP packet reaching my server, and the screen would flood with SYNs and ACKs and some billion queries.
