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This seems like basic stuff. I'm more interested in the story about how you got this to the top of the front page. Edit: Less obnoxious.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ahem, this is so wrong it's not even funny. I'm just calling it out because there are people here who are just learning how to code. You always create an index, on pretty much every query. That's as basic as commenting your code.
I'd hate to think how long your writes take...