Title: I've got a concept for an online service that will work properly only if the servers can receive and process a million + hits a minute for a minimum of one hour at a time.  Each hit will post new data that needs to be updated in the online database, and the newly updated data will become part of the dynamically generated page returned to the visitor.<p>The pages returned will be very small so I don't think page size will be an issue.  Instead I think that HTTP server (or perhaps database) speed limits may be exceeded here, or perhaps the dynamic page rendering engine will become the bottleneck.<p>???<p>My ultimate goal is to come up with an clear understanding of how to create a system that updates the database, and generates the dynamic HTML pages, and serves the pages to visitors -- fast enough that they do not experience slowdowns during the hour that this heavy load will exist.<p>How do I go about learning how to do this?  Have any of you done something like this in the past?  This is way beyond my personal experience level.  Thanks in advance for any suggestions you can provide.
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