[phendrenad2]

Who runs the Pharo site? Let's try to diagnose and help them. I don't actually believe in the hackers news hug of death, since many sites survive it just fine (because they take "static content" as seriously as one needs to in order to do so). I see that pharo.org has a "login" link at the bottom. Could the homepage be doing an auth cookie DB lookup on each pageview?

[lucb1e]

I don't have much static content, no cdn, do multiple database queries per request, my server isn't beefy enough to run any of the common content managers like WordPress or typo3 (well, each pageload took a very long time), and yet it survived the HN homepage on a few occasions.

A huge system like WordPress can't do dynamic content for more than a small number of visitors per second no matter how beefy the server and has to hackily convert content from dynamic to static content. Which is fine since it uses a lot less power to do static content instead of buying beefier and beefier servers, but it is not how WordPress meant its blogging software to have to be (maybe they gave up by now and do static rendering by default, but it used to be all plugin based). By writing my own tiny blogging software I implemented what I needed and it worked just fine on an Intel Atom CPU, even on the HN homepage.