Way back in 2000, when we launched Planetarion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetarion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetarion), we used C++ with a custom we

Way back in 2000, when we launched Planetarion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetarion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetarion), we used C++ with a custom webframework, and CORBA for communicating with the database. At our peak late in 2002, we served about 320 million dynamic webpages a month using three desktop Pentium 3's for webservers, and a dual CPU P3 for the database. No caching, as that wasn't needed. Blazing fast, and not all that difficult to work with once the basic framework was solid and in place.