A 30 second memcached/redis/etc goes a long way when sharing on HN. You go from 6k db hits to 60 hits in 30 minutes. Worked for me since 2013 [0].

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/handling-1-million-web-request

already on it, just shipped in-memory output caching while the thread was live. next step redis if it needs it