Basic stuff is valuable to people who need to learn the basics. Not everyone on HN is an experienced programmer, much less an experienced web programmer.
As I was scanning the comments on this post, I was a bit surprised by the all the "This post was too basic. You are clearly an amateur and wasting my time" comments. Well, to those authors, not everyone on HN is an l337 hax0r such as yourselves.
Yes, the author still has some work to do. Maybe if he spent another couple weeks just on this, he could get response times down. Maybe he should use a reverse proxy or maybe he shouldn't. As with most problems of this type, the answer is, it depends.
To a young programmer with a few years experience who may be working on his/her first high traffice website, I thought the blog post was fantastically written. It was clear, concise, explained well the low-hanging fruit of optimization, explained the difference between performance and throughput, and decisions-making/tradeoffs made when preparing for a traffic spike. Well done.
If you're a good enough programmer to know how to build the site, it's likely you know about profiling. Im surprised there are enough people who find themselves in this middle spot (can build complicated site but are still unaware of this info) to push the article up to the top page.
Having said that, nothing I submitted ever made it close to the top of HN. Maybe my understanding of the community is off.
Blackmail. I have pics of pg and Steve Ballmer sharing an ice cream cone, and I'll make them public unless I get the proper upvotes.
I actually don't know what happened here either. I was at a kid's birthday party, and I look on Twitter to see one of my cofounders had submitted this and that it was shooting up the front page.