Why are you assuming that their workload includes just one query per emitted certificate? The reality is that they are storing information during challenges, i

Why are you assuming that their workload includes just one query per emitted certificate? The reality is that they are storing information during challenges, implementing rate limiting per-account, supporting OCSP validation and a few other things. You can investigate further if you really want to see the queries that they make against the database since their software (Boulder) is open source [1]. Most queries are in the files in the "sa" (storage authority) folder. [1] https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder/ https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder/