Actually, I've talked witha few others on the Internet about this and have seen a few articles in reference to it.
IRC.
The servers that are handling this kinda work are not Linux based and they sure as hell aren't NT/2000 based (oh man...could you imagine a IRC server being worked out of a 2K install?
). As I understand it, Solaris or another Unix based OS, such as HP-UX are the type of OS that is required to handle that kinda load. A Linux server just can't handle the load of IRC. However, a Linux server would do a better job at it than a NT/2000 server would. This is as I understand it. Nothing beats Unix. Nothing.