[bawolff]

They could change the mediawiki config to use file cache ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgUseFileCache ) which is basically poor-man's version of varnish (it saves all the rendered pages on disk, and outputs that instead of rendering the page if you're not logged in or otherwise cant have a cached page). Would probably help a lot with the hn hug of death. Not sure if it would be enough, but it might be especially if combined with different max connection settings in the webserver to prevent memory starvation.