I can see it now - I got New York Times coverage (once in a lifetime thing), the new users start hammering the site and I am sending an email to Google begging them to increase the quota. Which they may or may not get by the next week or something.

You know, this just does not look like a good plan for success. Whatever happened to worry-less scale that they promised?

I'm going to assume since they mention getting dugg on that form that they will respond to that form quickly.

But you know what they say about assumptions.

Does anybody know what actual figures are for getting Dugg, Reddited, Slashdotted, NYTimed, etc?

500 requests/second seems pretty high to me. But I'm admittedly new to the big leagues.

It varies with the emphasis (front page or not) etc., here is some of the latest information I could find on super surges (some people reported over a million viewers):

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/06/12/yahoo...

Here's someone saying that dramatic swings can happen inside 60 seconds:

http://omniti.com/seeds/dissecting-todays-internet-traffic-s...

App engine averages out your quotas over time, so the limiting does kick in before you reach 30,000. It's not 30,000 every minute where once you reach 30,000 you have to wait until the next minute.