Yeah I run mirrors for certain sites in different regions of the world and a trick I often do is scrape the target site and then hold the entire site in memory. Even the top 500 posts of HN and all of the associated comments can fit in < 16 MB of RAM. If you want to serve that up over a socket, it's really fast to grab a pointer to the memory and just write it to the socket. You can get response times which are dwarfed by network latency that way.