[Seaside] Seaside Scaling - How successful?

[Rich]

I've been looking for a framework that will grow with my company's  
projected online growth rate and Seaside looks very interesting.  We  
developed a Java based web site for a beta product, but I'm not happy  
with the results or the amount of code/time required to make things  
work with Java.  I'm looking for something that will have a faster  
implementation and also scale well as we grow.  I stumbled across  
Seaside on Blog post and thought I'd take a look.  Seaside looks like  
it has some very nice features and I've been spending the last couple  
of days doing some of the tutorials and watching several of the "Why  
Seaside" talks.  Thanks to your community for posting those.

I do have some reservations about Seaside and I'm hoping that the  
members of this list can point me in the right direction for the  
answers or have some of their own success stories.  Here are my  
concerns at this point in time:

Scalability - How does one scale Seaside?  I've seen GemStone/S to  
help with persistence and using Apache for static content.  These seem  
very logical, but I'm still wondering what it takes in hardware to  
support 1K, 10K and 100K unique visitors per month to a Seaside based  
site.  I know this will be code dependent, but I'm interested in  
seeing 1) if its even possible to hit in excess of 100K visitors per  
month and 2) what it would take from a hardware perspective to hit  
this number of visitors.

Memory Requirements - I read in the archives, and I'm betting this is  
an older pre 2.8 rev memory number, it takes 2M per client for  
Seaside.  Is this still the case?

Hosting - What is the best way to host Seaside if you want to use  
someone else's hardware?  Has anyone implemented an AMI on AWS for  
hosting?

Success Stories - Any success stories where a site is servicing in  
excess of 5K visitors per day using Seaside?  If so, what did it take  
to get here and would you do it again?  How are you handling  
persistence?  What is your limit based on current hardware/software?

Learn Seaside  - What is the best way to learn Seaside for a non- 
Smalltalk developer?


Any information you could provide that would help me make this  
decision would be much appreciated.

Thanks for your time.

Rich