Let we apply this year again for the Google Summer of Code, which as you know is a Google's stipendium program for students to encourage them working on open-source projects [1]. Ok, our first step as community is to collect ideas for possible projects and to apply to the GSoC as an organization.
Follow the link to get involved in the conversation.
After some optimizations in both Seaside and AJP I managed to break 8000 requests / sec with a single Pharo 1.3 image. Thanks to SystemProfiler I knew where to look. This is with a single request handler that just returns a two byte response. It doesn't involve any rendering, sessions, continuations or whatsoever but it kicks on the full Seaside request handling machinery with a request context and everything.
It would be interesting to see how many requests a more "normal" set of pages could handle, but this sounds pretty cool.