Scalability issues

An individual posted a message on July 22, 2012, stating a testbed configuration including a Pentium 4 1.8GHz single core processor, 2GB RAM, FreeBSD 8 operating system, geli aes-128 + zfs sha-256 disk encryption, bitcoin 0.6.3 and Tor proxy. The poster made an estimate that Bitcoin would completely overtake the capabilities of this reasonable class of machines by the end of the year. According to a response to the post, the hardware configuration was slower than Atom class hardware with full disk encryption on a CPU and IO-heavy workload. The CPU being used was slower than the first generation of single-core netbooks recommended against using full disk encryption on due to insufficient CPU power. Therefore, it is not surprising that Bitcoin is not usable on this setup.