[kstrauser]

In the not-too-distant past I was handling many thousands of DB-backed requests per hour in a Python app running plain PostgreSQL.

You can get really, really far with a decent machine if you mind the bottlenecks. Getting into swap? Add RAM. Blocked by IO? Throw in some more NVMe. Any reasonable CPU can process a lot more data than it's popular to think.

[bluGill]

Anytime someone talks about scale I remember just how much data the low mhz CPUs used to process. Sure the modern stuff has nicer UIs, but the UIs of the past where not bad, and we a lot of data was processed. Almost nobody has more data than what the busiest 200mhz CPU on 1999 used to handle alone, so if you can't do it that isn't a scaling problem it is a people problem. (don't get me wrong, this might be a good trade off to make - but don't say you couldn't do it on a single computer)