MSDE - et spørgsmål om performance

Folks,

I need some extra eyes on an issue that puzzles me, i.e. the use of MSDE as the db engine for webapplications. I'm currently renting a full MS SQL 2000 license for my dedicated server (a couple of commercial ones but mostly sites in development) because I was led to believe that MSDE would underperform grossly when Internet users started to access the data. (I use SP's when I can and mostly run asp.net driven apps using output caching when suitable).

I discovered a 4 month old discussion thread in another forum where the author claimed to being able to (using some test software) output nearly 70 datadriven pages/second from an AMD 1.7 webserver with MSDE installed (using the SA account).
He then ran the same tests using the SQL 2000 server and fetched around 110.

Bottomline is that I'm not near neither of these numbers (not even at peaks) for my websites. I'm quite happy with the functionality of SQL2000 and I know that MSDE has its shortcomings but would it be corrent to assume that I could serve hundreds of simultaneous users requesting different pages on websites running on my server using the same SA/asp.net account?

Maybe I've missed something in the equation, but I'm anyway looking forward to having some expert opinions on the subject.

Thanks,
Niels (Brussels)


PS: Jeg undskylder at indlægget er på engelsk - men jeg prøver at finde ud af om andre har erfaringer med MSDE som db provider for high volume websites.