(In addition to the great advice that you need a medium instance, and Velocity+nginx would certainly become your friends) Could you provide links and examples?

(In addition to the great advice that you need a medium instance, and Velocity+nginx would certainly become your friends) Could you provide links and examples? I would be interested to know what headers your server is delivering (such as are you sending 304s on refreshes). Is it vmstat or top that's showing "the sheer volume of traffic is what is killing the CPU"? You didn't mention using APC, I assume that you have that configured. Also, have you ran inclued to see how your codebase is generating?