Guessing it's a CMS without a configured deep-caching server in front of it, like Wordpress, That does some DB request(s) and a few addon modules on each article request.

That's not to say its' bad, but is probably seeing higher than normal traffic. I've been interested in static content generation again.

I did a bit of sleuthing in the dev console.

The site is a static HTML site generated by Docusaurus [0]. That seems like it should be very fast and lightweight for serving tons of concurrent requests.

In the page's response header, it shows that the server is NGINX on Ubuntu. Ahhh, and "X-Powered-By: Express". I suspect that's the bottleneck, serving static assets via Node.js+Express, instead of directly with NGINX.

I also see in the document foot that it tries to load a script from http://localhost:35729/livereload.js. That could be a sign that the site is a development build, not optimized for production..?

[0] https://docusaurus.io/en/

I had a couple of posts go first page on HN in the last months. I run my blog on Ghost (the hosted SaaS version) and it's crazy fast. I have no idea how they do it, alas.