In the voice of Dr. Evil, "1 Billion records per hour!"

On a Friday night, we did a deployment that involved a data update into Salesforce.  Whilst using the Apex Data Loader utility, I achieved a unprecedented 1 billion records per hour rate from Salesforce!  This is over 300,000 records per second!

Indexing Delay?

A business user recently showed me that if she created a contact in Salesforce and then searched for that contact, that the contact would not be found.  It was so strange to see this that I opened a case with Salesforce support.  Support recently replied and said that this was expected behavior and that newly created records may not be searchable for up to 30 minutes while indexing is processing!  30 minutes!!