Case Study

I've tried to go through the groups and forums to glean as much information as I could prior to posting this. I fall into the category of someone who is fairly familiar with drupal and mildly familiar with server setups. There is a wealth information on Performance and tuning, but it leaves the novice without a clear path of how to scale. I though I would post my setup here along with my confusion, in hopes that it will help other individuals in the same boat.

My Current Setup
I currently have 400K nodes and 100 users
I hope to be able to scale to 100k + users 5M Nodes

The Pacific Cup is a yacht race from San Francisco to Hawaii, run every other July. What this means is that the site is pretty quiet for 23 months and then goes crazy with spectators (90k hits per day) for a month.

In 2008, our Drupal site overwhelmed the mySQL server on the dedicated host and brought the site to a crashing close. Since the Drupal-friendly webmaster was 1000 miles offshore at the time, the traditional co-webmaster quickly replaced the site with a static version, per agreed plan, and all was well.

I have been searching high and low for the best advice on stack setup for a site I want to release in the coming weeks/months. My issue is that nearly all discussion regarding performance only deals with anonymous and therefore easily cachable sites. I then stumbled upon this group which appears to be the answer to my prayers, although there is a lot of info in here to digest and make sensible use of.