Given that I'm currently personally setting up a caching cluster to host www.melbournecup.com (aka "The Race That Stops a Nation"), being able to gracefully han

Given that I'm currently personally setting up a caching cluster to host www.melbournecup.com (aka "The Race That Stops a Nation"), being able to gracefully handle a huge spike in traffic is something that is very much on my mind! :) The site itself is developed in Django and so far I'm just planning on putting a bunch of Varnish caches (behind a load balancer) in front of the Django server. I'm using the very nice Django Varnish app (https://github.com/justquick/django-varnish https://github.com/justquick/django-varnish) in the Django instance to automatically purge pages from the cache as they're updated. I'm deliberately trying to keep the setup as simple as possible, but the goal is to have a fast site and fresh content. Tips from others who have handled similar traffic loads would be very welcome!