I didn't think HN was that much traffic... does Micheal not typically get more than 20 people on the site?
HN is a _lot_ of traffic.
Max I ever saw was around 100 simultaneous connections on projects that jumped up on the page. Not sure I would consider that a _lot_ for any reasonable hardware.
I have seen up to 300 when you reach somewhere around the top of the page. Still not huge, indeed.
More likely to be that his websites code is _very_ unoptimized.
Really odd, since phronix has been on the frontpage of hn hundreds of times before.