How do I handle a million hits a minute?
owkaye: Here are my answers / comments to some of the recent posts (more replies to come).  Thanks again to everyone for your help and please keep your suggestions coming:to swombat:
The clients will have javascript so short commands rather than entire pages can be passed. Thanks for this suggestion, implementing this alone may totally eliminate my web server issues.to jwilliams:
You said even if my page is tiny that's still 1Gbps sustained, so by implementing swombat's javascript solution I can (hopefully) pass only data, thereby avoiding the potential bandwidth issue.to swombat:
The data cannot be stale, the response MUST include the results of the database search that is performed immediately after the visitor's last post is appended to the database.to andr and swombat:
I don't know what 'sharding' or 'microsharding' is but if the additional details I've recently posted is any help, maybe one or both of you can tell me if you think it is something that's possible, practical and/or appropriate to my needs?to mseebach:
Yes, every single write will affect every single subsequent read in a non-trivial manner.  You said the hardware will cost a lot and I'm sure that's true, but I expect the money will become available if the system I've conceived can be built to function as I'm trying to describe it here.to EVERYONE:Given the information you all have provided prior to the time I wrote this post, I have further refined my approach to this problem as follows.  Please tell me if this is the best approach in your opinions:1- I will use JavaScript to eliminate page loads and pass only the required 5-10 characters of data from the visitor to the server each time.  This should reduce or eliminate the need for multiple web servers and dramatically reduce bandwidth requirements.2- I will find someone who knows C to write an app that receives the data from each browser, pass it to the database with an append command, pass another command to search/sort the database table, retrieve the results, and pass them back to the JavaScript in the visitor's browser.If this appears to be the best approach so far, I still need to solve the database issue.  If you have any new comments or suggestions that might help me find the database hardware or software I need, please post them here, thanks.