The archi­tec­ture out­lined here has allowed us to prop­erly scale the site and res­ulted in massive per­form­ance increases across the entire site. Our average Rails response time on our pre­vious setup was any­where from 500ms to sev­eral seconds depending on how loaded the slices were. Moving to bare metal and fed­er­ated storage on Rackspace has brought our average Rails response time to con­sist­ently under 100ms. In addi­tion, the job queue now has no problem keeping up with the 280,000 back­ground jobs we pro­cess every day. We still have plenty of head­room to grow with the cur­rent set of hard­ware, and when the time comes to add more machines, we can add new servers on any tier with ease.