You cannot improve that you cannot measure -anonymous Isn't it so true. What's the point of investing in scaling up, scaling out, adding caching, accelerators, etc, when you don't know what you are getting in return. Before doing any performance tuning, it is important to measure the current performance and benchmark the improvements. It will also boost your ego :) Jmeter from Apache is probably one of the best open source tools to load the servers and measure response times. There are other tools for performance testing like YSlow which I will not cover here since it cannot do load testing. It will be a separate post. But do yourself a favor and at least install YSlow in Firefox. It's a drop dead simple tool which gives you the most crucial information. Of course you could also pay me top $$ for the same information. 1. JMeter: If you are anything like most geeks, you have already clicked on the link above and are well on your way to discover the tool yourself. If you are still with me, which I hope, the video below will show you how to set up a simple test. Read more »