A friend and former colleague at CNN.com writes:
Peak hits/min: 3 million
Peak page views/min: 1 million
4 million hits/min peak (sustained for 15 min, 23:05-23:20)
Max response time for cnn.com: 0.6 second
Dunno yet what total page views for the day wound up at. I picked 275M in the pool but we blew past that shortly after 10pm.
346,416,000 page views