Whenever I read about these web startup architectures I notice there is never a baseline comparison. They start with an insane architecture and then do heroics

Whenever I read about these web startup architectures I notice there is never a baseline comparison. They start with an insane architecture and then do heroics to transform it into something a little better. If you have a fast cgi service inserting a text message into a Postgres database, how many messages do you need until that doesn’t work?