Huh.

I've gone through the logs, and at most I got about 2 search queries per second as a sustained load over several hours. It's calmed down to about 0.5-1 QPS now.

This is ignoring other page loads. Not bad, if I do say so myself.

It's a statement to how much other websites are bad

Do I wonder how much cookies play into it.

Sure I have small page loads and reasonably optimized code, but I also don't use any cookies. I'd imagine having to keep track of upwards of a million session objects would be a struggle for almost any web server.

how on earth do you index so much on consumer hardware? my frontend developer mind is blown.

Wait till you learn that modern CPUs run billions of cycles per second. With multiple cores in parallel! And they can reach transfer rates of tens of gigabytes per second to RAM, or around a terabyte per second into L3.

And then you add a single HTTP request and everything tones down to the speed of the web. Or I/O. Or DB call.

More like: you add some javascript library and now the browser needs 5 seconds to run 10 MB of javascript.

You can still support millions of these requests per second if you just bake all of the dependencies directly in a small OS running on your fastest raspberry pi.

Consumer hardware today is simply what was cutting-edge and crazy expensive 5 years ago.