I've lots of lookuptables from which I'll generate my webresponse.

I think IIS with Asp.net enables me to keep static lookuptables in memory which I can use to serve up my responses very fast.

Are there however also non .net solutions which can do the same?

I've looked at fastcgi, but I think this starts X processes, of which anyone can handle Y requests. But the processes are by definition shielded from eachother. I could configure fastcgi to use just 1 process, but does this have scalability implications?

anything using PHP or any other interpreted language won't fly because it is also cgi or fastcgi bound right?

I understand memcache could be an option, though this would require another (local) socket connection which I'd rather avoid since everything in memory would be much faster.

The solution can work under WIndows or Unix... it doesn't matter too much. The only thing which matters is that there will be a lot of requests (100/sec now and growing to 500/sec in a year), and I want to reduce the amount of webservers needed to process it.

The current solution is done using PHP and memcache (and the occasional hit to the SQL server backend). Although it is fast (for php anyway), Apache has real problems when the 50/sec is passed.

I've put a bounty on this question since I've not seen enough responses to make a wise choice.

At the moment I'm considering either Asp.net or fastcgi with C(++).