How do I handle a million hits a minute?
swombat: Without much knowledge of the specifics it's hard to come up with a plausible solution, but here are some ideas:* Push off as much of the processing as possible onto the client. Ideally, the browser has a javascript library that deals with all the rendering/updating/etc, and just passes stuff to the server as short commands for which it receives an affirmative or negative response, rather than rendering an entire page for each requrest. This might drastically reduce your cpu usage, depending on what else you do in that request.* How live does the data have to be? Can it be a few seconds stale? If so, and if the data is similar for each user, cache the hell out of it as a bunch of static files served by nginx and the like, rather than dynamically serving any page at all.* Is it possible to do any sharding so that each bunch of users gets its own db server? It's easier to serve 10x 100k hits a minute than 1x 1m hits a minute.Without more specifics, it's hard to provide more specific advice though.