What stack can handle 500,000 orders per minute - 22.3 billion a month - on a $6/month server?

Most of them? 500k per minute is around 8k reqs/sec. $6 will get you 2 vCPU, so each CPU only needs to handle 4k requests per second.

I'd at least expect that to be possible in Node, and would be somewhat surprised if a Go or Rust framework didn't hit that mark.

I think 4k requests per second is quite ambitious even for native languages or garbage collected languages like Go.

Hello world will work, but once parsing, validation, and database queries get involved, you'll need some beefier hardware to get those numbers.

I can't get the cloud benchmarks for 2022 to work (a dedicated PowerEdge is the standard physical benchmark and that's not very realistic here), but according to these benchmarks: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&hw=... you're going to need some very optimized code to get close to 8k reqs/s.

OK, 10 minutes then ;)

My point was that the article quotes orders per month, while other systems are quoting requests per second. I found it funny that they tried to mask the low speed by using big numbers.

500,000 orders per minute on a $6/month server? Which language is able to achieve that?

Go

If you're going to pull numbers out of a hat at least provide some evidence, especially evidence based on a comparable workload.

I actually wrote a whole article about this myself: https://alicegg.tech/2023/02/06/4dollar-vps.html

TL;DR: go can handle 1000+ RPS on a ridiculously small server

But creating an order isn't just a request. PHP will also handle 1000 RPS of hello world just fine on a 4 dollars VPS.

Maybe (probably) Go is still faster than PHP, but the hyperbole is being pushed a bit too far here.

And what about the database?

I think the point was the $6/month server here.