I think, this is a common issue but cant seem to get a definite answer from anyone: Problem: -High volume of search results - atleast 100 pages of items with pictures. -Atleast 100000 hits a day. -Have Glassfish and struts with Oracle DB. -Do not want to store every search result in some session bean as the memory will soon reach capacity with so many users. Question: How to handle display of such huge amount of results and support sorting and other functionality?

I would go for progressive viewing (not bring back all matching records from DB, but only a subset=>page size) along with some sort of Caching..