I think we should get a decent stress testing setup going, so that we
don't have to try out all improvements on the live site.
I assume we are all running Unix/apache/php/mysql. Siege at
http://joedog.org/siege/ looks like a good choice of a free stress
testing utility. It can simulate n users hammering your site
simultaneously, even if you aren't connected to any network, and
reports response times and other stats.
We need a realistically sized database dump to start playing though.
We could then come up with a nice little Siege script that loads
RecentChanges, searches and downloads a couple of articles, edits a
couple others (maybe modeled on real stats from Jimbo), share the
script and use it as benchmark to try out patches to the PHP script
and database scheme.
Axel