Sensible Performance/Growth Strategies?

[Ryan Malayter]

On Friday, August 6, 2010,  <khatfield at serverorigin.com> wrote:
> Best performance you can get is off FreeBSD, just my personal opinion.

You'll probably find more people who swear linux is faster in their opinion.

Opinions shouldn't enter into it. The first rule of load testing &
tuning is that all changes you make must be fact-based.

1) record actual traffic patterns with your application, to get
relative proportions
2) develop test scripts which mimic those proportions as closely as
possible. Use JMeter or whatever. Apachebench doesn't cut it.
3) run controlled tests using your scripts to increase the user load
in slow steps
4) monitor systems, looking for bottlenecks
5) vary as few parameters as possible to address bottlenecks, then
repeat tests. One of those parameters could be Linux vs freebsd, but
I'll wager the OS won't matter much. The bottleneck is usually in your
dynamic pages or database.

-- 
RPM