WordPress & Extremely busy sites?

Anyone? Can WordPress handle this sort of traffic?

https://badnarik.org/supporters/blog/ is WP powered.
I know of but cannot recall another pro-one of the other site that is done with WP.
Matt’s site is fairly busy too, and has many links:
https://photomatt.net

It’s not simply a question of whether or not WP can handle it. Can the infrastructure that WP would be installed on handle it as well?

Infrastructure – what’s the bottleneck for WP then? CPU due to MySQL? I/O?
The blog I am considering converting from MT gets 900+ comments per post (in the space of minutes or hours), and MT cannot keep up.

WP is much more efficient in this regard. Just try it out, let us know how it goes.

i have a friend who once got 35000 genuine hits in 5 hrs on his blog (got slashdotted). he survived without problems…

WP handles this a lot better. I’ll explain why:
With MT, your pages are “re-created” each tim you post. This results in a big surge of CPU power, and then a lot less during normal traffic. If you have multiple postings per minute, it takes up a LOT of CPU power. However, if you post once a week – MT in this regard is actually ‘faster’ or less harsh on the CPU.
With WP, each pages is “re-created” each time someone view it – however it takes far less CPU power. So, whether you post a new entry or not – the same amount of CPU power is used. It’s more dependent on traffic. In this regard – WP is much faster than MT.
So, if you were to break it down:
MT’s CPU usage is dependent on amount of postings/comments
WP’s CPU usage is dependent on traffic.

yap. showing content > MT is better
getting feedback > WP is better