Yes. It&#x27;s not an especially exotic level of performance. Especially if you&#x27;re talking about applications that handle traffic from other machines, as opposed to humans. As websites go, Stack Overflow is of reasonable size, but as <i>systems</i> go it&#x27;s small.<p>They have about 7.5m visits per day to Stack Overflow. That&#x27;s about 86 requests per second, which perhaps at peak is several multiples larger than the average. I wouldn&#x27;t consider that a particularly gargantuan website. That sounds like traffic that you could service with a reasonable fleet of web servers and database fleet, given caching. Quite a lot of actions on the site can be applied with eventual consistency, I&#x27;d imagine.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackexchange.com&#x2F;sites?view=list#traffic" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackexchange.com&#x2F;sites?view=list#traffic</a><p>I don&#x27;t mean to say that the system or the problem that it&#x27;s solving is trivial - I am sure it is difficult to get right. As websites go, it might be large, but as <i>systems</i> go it&#x27;s not particularly high traffic among systems that receive traffic from machines rather than humans. Imagine that you operate a data center, and you want to sample CPU, memory, etc. from your machines every minute. If you collect 50 samples per machine per minute, and you have 258 machines, you&#x27;ll be handling 86 samples per second. Storing 86 samples per second into a time series database is probably considerably easier than SO&#x27;s website rendering, but it goes to show that high-traffic or high-frequency systems are common in companies beyond small to medium size. It is easy for cross-cutting concerns like this to have <i>massive</i> request volumes, far greater than the human-generated traffic to any website.