How do I handle a million hits a minute?
gaius: How much work can you do in the other 23 hours? Can you be asynchronously writing from an in-memory cache to a real database during that time? Or pre-computing anything? During that hour, how much (if any) data can you afford to lose in the event of a problem? How much data per transaction as we talking about? Do you need a relational database to generate your pages or could you live with a linked-list of structs (or a tree or whatever) until you can persist it off somewhere?(FWIW I work on an RDBMS-based OLTP system that handles thousands of commits/sec without breaking a sweat, and a lot more at peak times)