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These get requests are likely sharded among a large number of machines. Viewed that way, it's much more manageable. Want to service more requests? Just add more machines.

1.5M relational queries on the other hand--that would be impressive.

These are spread over an enormous number of machines.

OT, but for truly impressive single machine performance, check out the LMAX FX trading platform, which can handle 6 million orders per second on a single core on commodity hardware.....in Java. [1]

[1] http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html

Over 15,000 machines, it's roughly the same thing!

It all depends on how many servers you have, as well as what sort of databases/database complexity.

For a laughably trivial site, a single host could do a lot of requests per second without too much effort. For a normal Rails app running on a handful of hosts, 100 requests per second is nothing to scoff at, especially if you're on your own.