I posted recently about my experiences with Slicehost, Capistrano and Deprec.
As part of my approach for migrating the Top Secret Project to Slicehost, I’ve been testing my new VPS using httperf and autobench.
Maybe it’s just me, but performance testing and statistics is a whole lot of fun.
My 256 Slice running Apache proxied to two Mongrel instances peaks at about 41.6 requests/second, but can handle about 40 req/sec as consistent average. The single instance averages about 15 req/sec but can burst up to 30.
I think 40 requests/second is more than enough for my needs at the moment … it provides a pretty good peak capacity, and with Slicehost you can always get more resources when you need them - running extra Mongrels is wonderfully straight forward, but can also create slice to act as a dedicated database host. The options are endless.
One useful lesson: your client connection makes a BIG difference to these tests.
On my laptop running a wireless ADSL connection, the results were all over the place. Running the tests from one of my servers with a much fatter pipe, gave consistent test results.
For more information on using httperf and autobench, this is your best friend: HTTP performance testing with httperf, autobench and openload