Caching. I used to be responsible for sites involved with the Olympics. For 100 weeks traffic was next to nothing. For the two weeks preceding and two weeks du

Caching. I used to be responsible for sites involved with the Olympics. For 100 weeks traffic was next to nothing. For the two weeks preceding and two weeks during the games there really was spike after spike after spike. The site basically used nginx with SSI to serve up static content that was generated from Rails. Almost everything we could make static was. We rsync'd files every minute or so across the cluster and would lazy load for content at an individual node if needed. For dynamic stuff we figured out tricks to use JS, APIs and memory cache dynamic partials. I wouldn't recommend any of that unless you really have the need though.