Way back in 2000, when we launched Planetarion (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetarion" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetarion</a>), we used C++ with a custom webframework, and CORBA for communicating with the database.<p>At our peak late in 2002, we served about 320 million dynamic webpages a month using three desktop Pentium 3's for webservers, and a dual CPU P3 for the database. No caching, as that wasn't needed.<p>Blazing fast, and not all that difficult to work with once the basic framework was solid and in place.