Consider putting a squid cache in front of it. My tests showed that
my boxes were capable of returning about 15 pages per second
directly or over 500 pages per second with the squid cache.
You'll need to hack your pages to return a last-modified header for
pages that you want squid to cache. For a news page this could be
the posting time of the latest story or something. For the rest of
the pages squid will just fetch and return normally and should not
affect the site's operation.
