I'd be more interested in a writeup of what data you actually store. I've used Basecamp at a customer's before, and it certainly didn't justify the requirement of 1TB RAM, let alone 100kb RAM to serve quickly.

This sounds more like Reddit's problem where some architectural simplifications might net a giant win versus piling yet more gunk on top (Reddit is still perceptibly doing random IO for every comment in a thread during page load, or perhaps some insanely slow sorting, I have NFC how they haven't fixed this yet).