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A single c1.medium instance running the IdP in Jetty without Terracotta and a million user records and a standard set of attributes in an LDAP directory with authentication randomly choosing one of them can handle roughly 65 transactions per second. Optimizations can raise this to 80 tps. Memory(roughly 50% of "physical" memory is used by java) and disk utilization(negligible) are not considerations even with hundreds tens of thousands of concurrent authentication sessions, but situations can arise where the garbage collection with excessive user session objects collides with limited total memory results , resulting in a long freeze or crash of the jetty process. With stateless clustering, this will scale linearly. With stateful clustering, performance is likely to be considerably different. A single c1.xlarge instance running in the same fashion can achieve 300 transactions per second and is not susceptible to freezes or crashing during garbage collection.