Interesting, wouldn't mind having a chat outside of HN if you're interested (see my profile for mail). I've spent much of my career working on systems with act

Interesting, wouldn't mind having a chat outside of HN if you're interested (see my profile for mail). I've spent much of my career working on systems with active users from the hundreds to low thousands, but which process a huge number (50k/sec scale) jobs/tasks. It's a totally different kettle of fish, and if I'm totally honest I'm shocked at how badly "web" scales and how common these naive and super inefficient implementations are (hint: my bare-metal server from 2005 was faster than expensive cloud VMs). Recently I've worked on two high-usage systems (one of which was "handling" 30k requests/second for the first couple of week).