I don't have the problem but I'm interesting in hearing the solution...

The day I see that much traffic is the day someone else is blogging on my domain ;)

So do these types of things happen to single-post pages, or the main multi-post page? My guess would be that someone picks up on a permalink page resulting in the traffic avalanche? If this is so then static pages won't help because (I'm pretty sure) that makes a snapshot of the main multi-post page.

Some stuff you could sorta do that would sorta help is ask yourself how much "stuff" you really need on each permalink page. I like how evopress does away with the sidebar on permalink pages yah? Topically, it is going to be much easier for your server to serve up a page with only the content than the content AND the sidebar.

If you want the sidebar present you could ask yourself if all the widgets contained there really need to be on the sidebar on a permalink page. Maybe the linkblog can go? Maybe "who's online" doesn't matter there. The calendar takes up a lot of bytes so maybe not making a calendar will give the server a break?

All of that amounts to a tiny little breather for the server if you're suddenly getting flooded with thousands and thousands of page requests, but every little bit helps. I think!

just asking : this kind of problem only have to do with B2evolution or maybe your hosting plan could responsible for 80% of the problem ?

The answer is C: All of the Above.

The hits went directly to the permalink for that particular post. Within about two hours the count on that entry went from approximately 1,000 to more than 22,000. Those are just the ones that got through.

Had I known this was going to happen, I probably could have dreamed up some way to created a static version of the permalink page, and that would have kept the load on the MySQL database down significantly.

Within the past month we had moved the domain to a new load balanced dedicatedserver setup, but it had not yet set it up, so we were in essence running off a single server. We now have two synched Apache servers.

I'm using a modified Evocamp skin, and it does use a lot of php includes for content, but not for elements such as the Calendar, or who's online, or linkblog.

Maybe I should switch to USA political news instead of Middle Eastern....
:P