"The traffic levels were incredibly low for a system this size (< 10K visitors daily) and still it wouldn’t perform."
This kind of thing irritates me. User numbers are important, financially, because "10,000 users daily" can tell an investor or manager how much money is involved. But technically? That number doesn't mean anything to me. Are the visitors making one request or a hundred? Are they clustered into the five minutes before and after a horserace or are they spread out?
Being more specific would risk allowing the company to be identified, but you're absolutely right that just quoting user numbers by themselves is not going to be much help. Consider adding the words 'within the context of this application' wherever such metrics are used.
As far as interaction goes I would qualify this particular product as halfway between twitter and a social bookmarking site. More interaction than HN but signficantly less complex than twitter. Both twitter and HN are deceptively simple on the outside but remarkably complex underneath, so maybe I'm overstating the complexity level but it's not too far off the mark. By my estimate and using my own websites as a benchmark they should be able to run their current product on a single machine up to or over 100K users daily (using their current set of technologies), session times and concurrency of course play into that heavily.
I understand, and I'm sorry I seemed to be specifically targeting you. It's more of a general complaint: I've seen too many people using that kind of measure in a context where it's really not appropriate.
This kind of thing irritates me. User numbers are important, financially, because "10,000 users daily" can tell an investor or manager how much money is involved. But technically? That number doesn't mean anything to me. Are the visitors making one request or a hundred? Are they clustered into the five minutes before and after a horserace or are they spread out?