We have a site that hits 10k simultaneous requests all the time and we do not get 10 billion pageviews per day. Here's a few reasons why: Most sites have a pe

We have a site that hits 10k simultaneous requests all the time and we do not get 10 billion pageviews per day. Here's a few reasons why: Most sites have a peak load. Some of ours have a difference of 4x from peak to trough. Traffic bursts are also common. Especially if something is going wrong. You should always plan for something going wrong. Nothing sucks more than going down because of a traffic burst because you just brought your systems back up from a failure. In the past we didn't always plan for this and it could take an hour to get the site back to full health even after we fixed the original problem.