lory,
here is what alex suraci from the runtime team wrote back:
We are not using the bandwidth limit features but I believe we set limits on things like file descriptors (16k) and # of processes (512). With a barrage of requests they could be hitting the FD limit.
again, if you have a particular scaling load and use case in mind, we would like to understand it. we know there are going to be limits and breaking points to the system somewhere depending on how heavily it's stressed. if your test harness is public, please share the details with us.
we have load tests that we execute as part of our integration tests and expect basic web performance to work well. we also have users that have been big loads on cloud foundry in production. here is an example from last year's comic relief, a UK charity, payment system that cloud foundry handled well [1]. of course we can always improve and we welcome any specific feedback or contributions that help improve performance.
A year of planning for Red Nose Day 2013 resulted in a 6 week media campaign culminating in 7 hours of prime time television coverage on the 15th March. Their donations platform is required to process in the region of 600,000 transactions in this 7 hour period, handle in excess of 10,000 concurrent call centre operators, and handle peaks of 500 donations completing per second from web, mobile and call centers.