I suppose a lot of that depends on what users are loading onto the database and how many are active at the same time and what the limits are from your web host. Anyone know how many users are there on this website?

LOL!

I think you wouldn't as long as you have a server powerful enough handle that much amount of traffic.

Friends, have a look at http://docs.elgg.org/wiki/Scalability

@Lee: this site is having 48228 members, with around 12-20 online at a time.

You would likely need to have much more than just a monster server to handle that load.  Strong infrastructure design with lots of sophisticated caching, compression, monitoring, load balancing and independant sub-systems to manage all those functions.

In short, you would have to architext a VERY sophisticated infrastructure.  Elgg will let you, if you have the proper skill sets to acomplish all that.

ok, thanks for the info.

@ team webgail: Thanks for the stats :)

Team Webgalli, sorry.