Which language should I use here?

Hi All,

I've got a request for a very simple web service that will be parsing URL variables and inserting/updating three fields in a database - userid int, a bit, and one or two timestamps. This peice will return _nothing_.

Obviously, the logic in the interface will be extremly simple, so building the app will probably consist of less than 50 lines of code, including making db connections.

The kicker is, the app will need to handle 500,000+ "requests" a second with 200+ million of these tiny records stored in the table.

I'm pretty confident I'll be using a mysql cluster on the backend, but I'm undecided as to which app language/web server I should use. Which would be best suited for handling these very lightweight but very popular requests? PHP+Zend, Python, mod_perl, Java, C, etc? The top tier will be load balanced and has no need to store presence, share memory, or anything complicated like that.

Any other tips would be extremely helpful as well!

Thanks,

Gabe