the performance degrades to a point where it'll be too slow to do anything Do you have any examples? In my experience, Redis is pretty fast even when it l

the performance degrades to a point where it'll be too slow to do anything Do you have any examples? In my experience, Redis is pretty fast even when it lives partially in VM. You can get boxes with a ton of RAM these, days, though, and if you go beyond it, you can always shard/distribute the database, like you mention.