RE: Load of 4 Million Queries Read and or Write Per Second

> That is 4 Million Queries per Second which is 14 Billion 400
> Million per
> hour.
>
> This may sound a little big but this is what we will be

I think that may just be the biggest understatement I have
ever read. I'll just include a little quote from a press
release by a company about setting up WWW based voting in
America. Perhaps it will lend some perspective to the task
you are describing.

====
META Group estimates that a national Web-based system would require 150
individual Web sites using a distributed computing method to handle the
Web traffic generated by more than 204 million eligible US voters.

Voters would be able to cast their ballots online -- at home, in the
office, or at community polling locations. Voters would download
approximately 10 pages of data as they completed ballots within a
15-hour voting period. META Group estimates that 13,628,134 voters would
cast their ballots each hour during election day, visiting 136,281,336
Internet pages per hour. To handle this load, the 150 sites would need
to be outfitted with 300 dual-CPU Web servers, 450 four-CPU application
servers, and 450 four-CPU database servers.
====
The full release is here:
http://domino.metagroup.com/newweb.nsf/oPressRelease/F956632E704768E4852
5699F0056EF36?OpenDocument

Perhaps another piece of perspective is that you seem to be wanting to
do a query for every person on earth every half hour.
http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/ipc/popclockw

Or one query every 1.5 minutes for every person with a connection to the
internet.
http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/index.html

Crumbs......

--
Paul McGarry mailto:paulm(at)opentec(dot)com(dot)au
Systems Integrator http://www.opentec.com.au
Opentec Pty Ltd http://www.iebusiness.com.au
6 Lyon Park Road Phone: (02) 9878 1744
North Ryde NSW 2113 Fax: (02) 9878 1755