Please help with how to improve time prformance of Query?Question asked in Amazon

1 question:
Imagine you have a database that can only do 2,000 queries a second. Your web application gets 5,000 queries a second, what can you do to improve the situation? After asking him for some clarifications, he added: Imagine its a stock quote engine for NASDAQ and that the queries are about the top 100 stocks at closing.

2nd question:
Imagine you have a big online storefront. Your webserver can only do 1,000 concurrent requests. Many people are visiting your website and you want to support 3,000 concurrent requests. What would you do? I asked for some clarifications, and he said: The limitation is computational power and not bandwidth.


This questions were asked in Amazon's phone interview, is posted by the person who had interview, but there are no answers and i have interview with them in 5 hours..
please please help me...

please :-(

Distributed database. If first database full, query the second and so on.

Also do queries with indexes (for the 1st questions). For the 2nd question I am agree limitation is based on computer hardware, but are you sure you have used resources as effective as possible?