[HelloNurse]

A sensible plan shouldn't mention both "100000 simultaneous visitors" and "I'll have a bit of free time in the next couple months to just sketch out ideas".

100000 simultaneous visitors are a huge number that implies both progressive growth over a long time, without wasting resources in premature, oversized and overcomplicated infrastructure, and a solid business plan (in fact, an exceptional one) behind that growth, making products and services more important and more sophisticated than generic web application scalability.

On the other hand, two months of experimentation can allow you to learn a lot about highly scalable web application architectures and related technology, but building a real one requires an actual business; the most you can do on your own is reimplementing some benchmark.

[star_juice]

That's why I put the range starting at 1000 simultaneous users funny enough, but I also wasn't sure if 100k was comically low (I suppose if you just wanted to serve static pages with a jpg and one line of text it might be) or high so left it in. That's already some insight to work from, but you may be mistaking me wanting to serve 100k simultaneous T shirt buyers with an actual expectation of needing that much margin: I don't, but I do want to know how/why the back of store infrastructure for such a large number of users works, and more about what a solo developer/small team would realistically want to choose instead.

To be clear I am not trying to create a business, I'm wondering what the ecosystem of best practices, tools, and frameworks to solve an open ended problem like this is so I can try them out before trying to build a real one (which I think you're right, would require an actual business to justify its existence) For example: could you elaborate on some possible benchmarks to try reimplementing, to this end?