It's not a typical case, but e.g. Talkinator is cheap to run and potentially reaching millions of people. http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2008/08/benchmarking-t

It's not a typical case, but e.g. Talkinator is cheap to run and potentially reaching millions of people. http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2008/08/benchmarking-talkinator.html http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2008/08/benchmarking-talkinat... "In my benchmarks now, on my quad-core desktop the talkinator server can push about 39000 messages per second. Keep in mind this is processed messages as in decoded, packaged, and queued for particular recipients." The typical architecture for web applications is pretty inefficient.