Flash crowds and network management

Sean Donelan writes:

So does anyone have any practical/technical advise on how the
government sites could have done better. Be carefull about
following IBM's webhosting manager J.D. Zeeman's example of
foot-in-mouth problem when he said "I doubt they are scalable
to the extent of the ones we have." LOC's servers were made
by IBM.

Using fast-cgi and such helps a bunch. Of course, for all I know, they
did that already.

Perry