[gerrys0]

Thank you.

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.