1 Million users.. I can't Scale!!

[yoda]

>1. How are you transmitting your SMSs?
Currently, a number of different gateways are being used: 2 provide a
SOAP web service interface, 1 other provides a REST based web service.

A transaction using the SOAP web services takes 3-5 seconds to complete
(from the point of calling the method to receive an error\success
confirmation)
The REST web service transaction takes 1 second or less to complete.

> 2. If you disable the actual transmission, how many SMSs can your
>application generate per second?
Currently, the content is generated and a number of SMS per user are
generated. I'll have to measure this more accurately but a cursory
glance indicated that we're generting approximately 1000 sms per
second. (I'm sure this can't be right.. the parser\generator should be
faster than that:)

Additionally, I've just confirmed that the gateway's we use can pump
out 20-100 sms's per second. This is currently too slow and we'll
probably get direct access to the mobile operator's SMSC which provides
larger throughput