Well said - I remember reading somewhere before that the database was mentioned (as usual) as the problem area.
Someone else in the comments mentioned 400K messages a day, plus personal messages, say thats even another 400K.
I have zero experience working on a high traffic web application, but I work on a serious database application were we can push somewhere in the region of 1M transactions in a 6-8 hour window. Each of these transactions comes in the form of an XML string and results in as many as 20 plus selects and maybe 10 - 20 inserts.
Our application is build on top of Oracle and implemented in PLSQL - not too sexy, but it seems to get the job done.
The point I am trying to make is that with a bit of a caching layer it takes some serious throughput to reach the limits of database scalability (certainly with Oracle, where is where my experience lies).
Someone else in the comments mentioned 400K messages a day, plus personal messages, say thats even another 400K.
I have zero experience working on a high traffic web application, but I work on a serious database application were we can push somewhere in the region of 1M transactions in a 6-8 hour window. Each of these transactions comes in the form of an XML string and results in as many as 20 plus selects and maybe 10 - 20 inserts.
Our application is build on top of Oracle and implemented in PLSQL - not too sexy, but it seems to get the job done.
The point I am trying to make is that with a bit of a caching layer it takes some serious throughput to reach the limits of database scalability (certainly with Oracle, where is where my experience lies).