It's not just the quantity of queries, it's what the application does. Twitter needs to do specific things very quickly(in this case answer search queries). You

It's not just the quantity of queries, it's what the application does. Twitter needs to do specific things very quickly(in this case answer search queries). You could look at a more general high-traffic site(like Facebook) to find a different approach(highly optimized php compiler). I don't think looking to such a large team on such a large project for a role model is beneficial to small teams, they have different considerations and abilities.