Your app is falling down because it’s been Slashdotted. Your database can’t handle the query surge. Your app is highly dynamic so tossing up a static front-page, using Akamai, etc. isn’t viable. How can you handle 30kviews/s?
You have a moat. Squid or Apache with mod_cache can be configured with very short cache-durations (Expire or CacheDefaultExpire, respectively): I like 3 or 5 seconds.
It’s not so hard to handle 30kviews/s when 29,999 of them are from cache, yet for 99.9% of your users, they’ll see no human-discernible difference between the 1st request, and the 30,000th.
Bring the fire. We have a moat.