Yes, obviously. I know several professional level network engineers that do nothing besides scale backend networks for websites and for business/university level computer networks. I know that it is not simple or that someone can tell me everything there is to know about it. I am just asking, has ELGG ever been studied in this way/actually modelled in the way that makes it capable of splitting the database and scripts into separate servers to create a horizontal scaling model that would allow for just simple script reproduction to split users into separate user bases connected by a single backend?

Yes - but not in the simplistic script manner you have described ;) Have a browse/ study through my ElggCamp Boston 2009 presentation "Distributed Elgg Directions - A Conceptual Design"...

Thanks Dhrup and Evan, for your input.

the website will essentially go live with just about 100,000 entities, but the client's optimistic that it will eventually get up to 10 million.  And the client can afford beefy servers and hardware/database redundency. These are what we usually call 'good problems'.  If their sales and services go up to that level we can afford to do major refactoring in the system.

Thanks for the link to the Scalability Doco Evan. 

Dhrup, could you fill me in on the details of the SocNet website testing, are these published/non-confidential ?

Cheers,

Shaktus