If it's static content (ie, not changing super frequently and not customized per viewer), you could drop Varnish in front of it and more or less crash-proof the

If it's static content (ie, not changing super frequently and not customized per viewer), you could drop Varnish in front of it and more or less crash-proof the whole thing. Cloudflare is a similar sort of solution, but you don't control it and it's been spotty for me. You can optimize your application all you want, but you're never going to get better performance that a caching proxy handling most of your requests.