How to deal with the C10K problem with a simple script?
cperciva: This isn't the C10k problem.  The C10k problem is "how do you handle 10k mostly idle connections" -- the situation where per-concurrent-connection costs matter (e.g., you really don't want to have 10k processes, each handling a single connection).Your problem is simply "how do I handle huge amounts of traffic".  The first half of the answer, as you guessed, is to use EC2; the second half is to throw traffic at it and make sure that you get the response (whether it's in being able to handle the necessary number of requests or scaling automatically) that you want.The middle half is to make your code as efficient as possible; I would not recommend storing directly to SimpleDB.  Just log form submissions locally and then process them as a batch.