>> Building a web application is a young and poorly-understood activity.
Sorry, no. People have been shipping, and understanding how to ship web applications for... what, 10, 15, 20 years now?
Sorry, no. People have been shipping, and understanding how to ship web applications for... what, 10, 15, 20 years now?
There is like 10 million people around that shipped a web app.
It's another matter altogether to ship code with tens of thousands of requests per second and a lot of teammates trying to change it simultaneously.
Define "request"
If the "request" is to deliver some static file, that has been solved many years ago with CDNs and server caches and so on.
If the "request" is to do something other than static files, it has nothing to do with Web. It could be request to your bank's COBOL app or a request to their Java app or to their Node.js app. Nothing to do with Web.
What I do is -- look at what very big players are doing (Salesforce, Facebook, etc) and follow that.
Also, look at what all random minor players are doing, and absolutely ignore that.