Fascinating that our stories intersect so much. I later converted that Delphi code to ASP/VBScript because native Delphi code ran really slow on a new DEC Alpha AXP server because of emulation on the RISC architecture. ASP code was much faster despite being interpreted :) I found ASP way more practical too. Access was also my native next choice of database. Not very scalable, but day and night difference compared to a text file :)
I never really stopped to think about it, but ASP was indeed quite performant, considering it was all interpreted, running in late 90s shared-hosting hardware with very little RAM and super slow hard disks. The site got a few thousand active users and worked quite well, apart from the DB size limits.
Fast forward 10, 20, almost 30 years and I frequently encounter websites that struggle to work under the same load, even with expensive AWS bills, especially when working with Rails.
Perhaps ASP was performant because the site was a few orders of magnitudes smaller than anything you'd see today, even though it was full featured. Probably 1000x or 10000x smaller if I also include third-party libraries in the count. It was quite comparable to serverless/edge computing actually.
