high-performance

Hello BOA users around the world. I would like to discuss a possible implementation of BOA in a High-Availability / High-Performance setup.

Preface:
I've been using BOA for my business infrastructure on a Linode VPS for almost a year. I've been working on a relatively large website for the past 6 months that will require some flavor of ha/ hp setup since it will serve well over 30k uniques a month and loads of video streaming.

Desired Architecture hosted on AWS
--------------------------------- Load Balancer ---------------------------------

Tools like ab or siege are inadequate for testing sites served by Nginx (or Lighttpd). They both use threads instead of multiple processes. ab is based on the Apache Portable Runtime, hence it uses the same type of request handling at the OS level that Apache uses.

First, many thanks for the invaluable tuning discussions/resources here and on 2bits. They've been most helpful.

Lately I've been testing a change from:
mpm_prefork
suEXEC
suPHP
zend Optimizer

to the recommended:
mpm_worker
suEXEC
mod_fcgid (2.3.6)
APC (3.1.7)

I mainly followed the excellent instructions and relative values used here: http://2bits.com/articles/apache-fcgid-acceptable-performance-and-better...