Thoughts

I couldn't find a clear quick intro on getting siege and bombard in action, so I'm writing one here. Siege is a load testing and benchmarking utility that has been available for quite a while, It allows you to hit your web application on a specific url (or a set of urls in a file) with specific concurrency and size settings.  siege summarizes the measures of the test outcome including: Transaction rate (requests/sec) Actual concurrency (even if you hit with 200 concurrent connections, your server might be responding with just 80) Average, longest and shortest response time example: triggering 200 concurrent users, each hitting the url twice siege -c200 -r2 http://www.modsaid.com/ summary: Transactions:         400 hits Availability:      100.00 % Elapsed time:       38.44 secs Data transferred:        0.26 MB Response time:       10.09 secs Transaction rate:       10.41 trans/sec Throughput:        0.01 MB/sec Conc

2 days ago Linode finally announced their new VPS Hosting offering with doubling the RAM and moving to Fast SSD storage SSD Storage will allow much faster operations for both setup operations, compilation and ongoing running services. And the new memory upgrade is considered a drop in the pricing to the half, since people can now use the same server Ram with half the price they used to pay. The smallest Instance offered by linode is now the 2GB Instance with $20/mo as stated in their pricing list: Plan RAM SSD CPU Transfer Outbound Bandwidth Price Linode 2G 48 GB 2 cores 3 TB 250 Mbps $0.03/hr | $20/mo Linode 4G 96 GB 4 cores 4 TB 500 Mbps $0.06/hr | $40/mo Linode 8G 192 GB 6 cores 8 TB 1 Gbps $0.12/hr | $80/mo Linode 16G 384 GB 8 cores 16 TB 2 Gbps $0.24/hr | $160/mo Linode 32G 768 GB 12 cores 20 TB 4 Gbps $0.48/hr | $320/mo