I'm a staff member on a community site (ticalc.org), the biggest fish in a small pond. We get about 250,000 visitors in a normal month, averaging about 3 pages per visit. For the past 5 years or so, the site was hosted off a dual Pentium Pro; before that we had a 486. Currently it's a VM living in Germany. Postgresql, Apache, Linux.
We've been Slashdotted several times, without any appreciable slowdown. How does that work? The whole site is static content. Dynamic content is either rendered out to disk when it changes, or is a couple of static page fragments that are combined at serving time--and this is only for logged-in users.
(Granted, the last time the site was redesigned was 2001. I'm working on a new design right now. I have no plans to make it any slower.)
We've been Slashdotted several times, without any appreciable slowdown. How does that work? The whole site is static content. Dynamic content is either rendered out to disk when it changes, or is a couple of static page fragments that are combined at serving time--and this is only for logged-in users.
(Granted, the last time the site was redesigned was 2001. I'm working on a new design right now. I have no plans to make it any slower.)