Takes 500 cores to do 5,000 requests per second? How about 50,000 per second on my Macbook.
How'd I get it so much faster? Easy. I used JavaScript
Basecamp did 5,250 req/sec at peak yesterday. Mean response time was 90ms. So call that needing 500 cores at max load. If you skipped redundancy, you could probably do that with 3 boxes each running a Z5 192-core AMD chip with room to spare. Servers have gotten crazy fast!