To combat the rising tide of surgically transplanted organs by alien terrorists what is needed is a... probe ...for an organ they dare not change. Like the prostate area.

I would be loath to put a potentially malware infested software like G-WAN on my machines, so am unable to make a direct comparison. I also don't have a machine that matches the spec published for it. Nevertheless, the G-WAN curves are similar to rani's curves for TPS. Perhaps you could share the performance numbers that you have observed?
As for the rest, it was a weekend effort. What more do you expect?

A while back I had written a minimal HTTP server to figure out I/O completion ports in Windows over a weekend. You can download it from (BSD license): http://arunsagar.com/Code/rani.cpp
Similar throughput specs as the OP's server, and the C++ code can be part of the server itself (great for debugging). Buggy and incomplete, but you can play, fix and extend as you wish.

And I just finished reading Anathem. It's quite gripping and entertaining, far from being awful. It is an impressive effort at stitching together some of the leading philosophical and scientific issues of our time in a work of fiction. It is still a Neal Stephenson book -- meaning there is 3 pages of plodding drivel for every page of sheer brilliance. But he has improved from his Baroque cycle (>10:1 ratio). I think you gave up too early, i.e., the good stuff happens in the second half of the book. It also helps if you are going "WTF?" trying to make sense of the Arban vocabulary and mythos; that means the book is thought provoking and you will probably enjoy it as a result. I would hate to even give a hint as to how it progresses, but it is totally a hard sf book, about as hard as it can get without becoming non-fiction. It could have had more humor like his earlier work, but he probably ratcheted down given the nature of the story. Unlike his earlier books, even the ending doesn't suck, which is saying a lot.
The best way to read this book is to imagine a puzzle's solution is being unfurled right before your eyes. You can guess what it will look like at the end, and may even solve it before the book is over; nevertheless it is the journey, the experience of reading the book, that makes it worthwhile. Or not, if you don't like long 1000 page journeys unless they are all adrenaline pumping every single page.

If you break down accessibility in to 3 essential components : 1. local loop, 2. back-haul, 3. international connectivity, you'll find that India has severe problems with 1&3 and not 2. You can get all the expertise for 2, but there is a de-facto cartel blocking cheap access to #3 and even if you were to solve that problem (through better negotiations or laying your own ocean fibre), I think the worst problem is #1. Even that suffers from a difficult problem: lack of demand. Of the people willing to pay for broadband, most will opt for the Rs.100-250/mo plan for crapband. Very few will see the value in the Rs.1000/2Mb+(uncapped) plan and they will not drive your market in volume. I think this is the reason that Reliance, Tata and Bharti have not expanded their ISP offerings beyond the top tier markets and they basically have no problems with #2&#3 above (or even #1, which is a relatively minor marginal expense).
Unfortunately and very regrettably, I think your venture is doomed, much like Indian Railways' railnet.

Great my ass, aye.

It's not as if they will incur the wrath of Xenu if Bender joins an adventure club.
Personally, I would like to see some more changes. Too many dysfunctional Euro-Alien-Robot relationships. How about replacing them with a nice healthy nuclear North American family? With income derived from providing a non-fossil fuel based energy. And get rid of those robots, we need more diverse ethnic types for comic relief. And tone down all that unrealistic slapstick stuff. In fact, set the whole show in present day, not a thousand years from now. It might offend people living a 1000 light years from here.

Last time I had checked (couple of years ago) I got the impression it was GPL or commercial. Now I see that the former has been changed to LGPL. I stand corrected.

Consider the Solitaire program a demonstration of technology; in this case an SVG engine. The engine was not created for the sole purpose of supporting it. I have a whole host of future applications in mind for that. The royal suits happen to be a very good text of intricate vector graphics; though the included cards by David Bellot do not use gradient/filter effects.

Probably because Silverlight/XAML is the correct answer if you are doing any .Net work. Just a no brainer if you are an ISV. SVG start looking superfluous.
It is also fairly easy to take an unmanaged C++ SVG engine and put CLR bindings for it. But a world of pain vice versa.

Silverlight is an obvious long term strategy to extinguish SVG and supplant it with XAML. Same as they did to OpenGL with DirectX. Or tried to.

Thanks. Hearing about it for the first time. It looks like a solid piece of work. However (ignoring GPL for the moment), it says it has an "Importer for simple SVG files...", implying it probably only has a fraction of SVG.
It's demo programs are also coming in at ~650-900K. It might be too heavy. Perhaps if there was just a demo of an SVG viewer a proper evaluation can be done...

I looked at AGG brief. No doubt a work of a person more qualified and talented than yours truly. He has even implemented an SVG renderer.

Unfortunately, it suffers from three problems:
1. Even though the AGG renderer is superior visually to GDI+, it is extra baggage in file size and the visual differences not great enough to justify that difference.
2. Inability to use hardware acceleration that GDI+ gives.
3. The SVG processor is woefully inadequate, even less than my humble efforts. It really only highlight AGG's superior graphics capabilities for certain rendering constructs but ignores the rest.

I may mention the GPL requirement in the latest version is troublesome, but that is not completely fatal. Perhaps I am wrong and should give it another look. I'd be happy if someone can point to an adequate AGG based SVG rendering engine that comes in under 200K.

Considering that Qt is not really totally free, not a good choice. Plus it's fat is worse than native Windows when you factor in static compilation.
If you would have given my program a spin you might have noticed my disdain for unnecessary fat. Hence no .NET, no MFC. And I daresay the standard C++ library plus Win32 is good enough. Even GDI+ was a reluctant addition, but I succumbed to using it since most Windows installation have it by default. Ditto for MSXML.

I had that same dilemma going in since I dislike the verbose XML syntax. I hope my experience is of some help.
One of the ideas I had early on was, after reading in the SVG in memory, to save it back in a different "superior" file format to save space. The intent was to read this easier format and render it with no XML overhead. Turns out there was little gain, if any. SVG is fairly lean, as is, after compression. All the repetitive elements get compressed away to nothing by arithmetic compression.
The XML processing overhead is miniscule (probably 4-10K) since I used MSXML. Even so I am thinking of using tinyxml, which may not be too much of an overhead.
As long as you don't start using Schemas and other heavier XML constructs, which many SVG editors don't support anyway.

You are probably right. But through conditional compilation, an open source library will give you that ability. The trouble comes in when you have a general purpose agent (like a browser) which must support the full spec. If all the SVG creatives are in your control, you can specify restrictions at source and achieve optimal file size/good-looks tradeoff.
I was unsuccessful in that attempt with Cairo, but I'll admit I may have given up too easy after about a week's worth of effort.