Noticing this a few days late, but feel the need to defend myself. I've worked for two data mining and data aggregation companies. Currently working for a real time vertical search company. We do 45k in the blink of an eye. real time search over millions of documents is HARD. Granted we have lots of hardware and bandwidth. I'd put 45k at entry level scaling problems and see no reason to brag or get excited over it, which is why I asked for clarification.