I wonder if it's because the laptop sorta has its own built in UPS.

Built-in UPS and peripherals are nice advantages of a laptop as a server.

The problem with a laptop is terrible cooling that you can't sustain high performance. They say new Macbooks are better in that aspect but didn't have a chance to try one.

Yeah. M1/2 ones are a lottt better than Intel in this regard but still slower than the M1/2 MBP or mini.

Good point.

I ran one of the popular web sites in Turkey on a AMD Duron 600Mhz 512MB RAM server until 2003. It used to serve 70 million pages per month on a Windows Server when it was retired. Because the site is a social platform, most of the content had to be dynamically generated too. I believe the PC had cost me around $500 when I bought it in 2000 or so, obviously a lower spec than even a Raspberry Pi4 today.

And then people started writing code in Python.

Exactly. Developers seems to be hell bent on making software as slow as possible and/or maximising the cost of running servers. I bet that 99% of businesses out there could comfortable run on a single server with lots of RAM. With another servers on warm stand-by.

It's more fun to try and figure out where the bottleneck would be.

Back in the early 00s I hosted websites on my local off the shelf Dell desktop on a cable internet connection.

Cloud computing wasn't really a thing and I didn't know better / have much better options (eventually I did migrate to some webhost bundled with the DNS registar).

For the longest time network bandwidth was my limiting factor. I remember finally upgrading my connection, NIC, etc. to the point where it was actually harddrive write speed that was the bottleneck.

Probably depends on your application but harddrive I/O does seem like a likely limiting factor to me today.

SSDs are pretty fast.

Hardware wise, kinda depending on the characteristics of the app. Network wise, I've seen this tried. Commercial internet, even if it is symmetrical 1Gibps has nearly no SLA tied to it and is subject to traffic shaping. Not only could you be turned off at the companies whim if you began to saturate the points up to your demarcation point, but they could also traffic shape you for a time (or indefinitely). This all largely has to do with how internet telephone companies and cable companies categorize and pool traffic in their regions up to backbones.

Also save for the fact that commodity hardware lacks a lot of the hardware safeties a server does. For instance, your m.2 under sustained load would not perform at the same rate that an enterprise server hard drive can; we're talking on an order of 180MiB/s vs 550MiB/s per drive.

It seems that you might be assuming the entire stack ran on that laptop which is probably not the case.

I’m assuming it’s a service, so I’m curious how many people the Mac is responsible for serving. Of course more likely to be innocuous and maybe not in the serving path at all