bigs site already exist running perl amazon yahoo how? not just hardware we won't talk about mod_perl tuning dbi tuning hardware it's all about caching tmtowtdi it's nearly always worthwhile page-level caching gets the best performance pre-generation from a batch job, serve static pages mod_proxy have apache proxy requests in reverse intercept 404, generate a page for that url, serve that instead the mason cache Cache::FastMmap cache stuff in memory like a giant cache Cache::Memcached good if you want to cluster queues no matter how many users on your site, you only do as much work at once as you can other work is in the queue you can give users a status 'you are 12 in the queue' so they won't go away spread::queue