Mahout recommender scalability, hardware architecture

[Gustavo Frederico <gu...@thinkwrap.com>]

  I'm trying to understand if/how the Mahout recommender can be used in
production for an e-commerce site. My general question is how does it
scale? I know I would need to make some assumptions, but roughly speaking,
how would it scale as a function of the # of products in the catalogue, #
of shoppers and page requests?
  I watched Ellen Friedman's presentation at
http://chariotsolutions.com/screencast/philly-ete-34-build-recommender-best-practices-apache-mahout-solr-ellen-friedman/.
It's interesting to see Solr there for offline training, but - given a
certain catalogue size, # of shoppers and average daily page requests - can
I aim at everything behind-the-fireall or will I have to resort to a hosted
cloud-based architecture, with on-demand provisioning of servers, etc ? For
example, a catalogue of 10K products, 40K registered shoppers, and 3K
average page views daily (* over all pages) what would be a feasible
architecture and why?

Thanks

Gustavo Frederico