4. Instead of CPU profiling at a lower level, I'd suggest enabling profiling in xdebug for a debugging account and hit the pages and look for what pages took th

4. Instead of CPU profiling at a lower level, I'd suggest enabling profiling in xdebug for a debugging account and hit the pages and look for what pages took the longest to render (server side). Then examine the xdebug profiling logs for those pages to see what php calls took the longest, if youre calling MySQL through PHP functions this will also show you the slowest queries. You should also enable slow query logged in MySQL. I suggest anything taking more than 50ms 5. For a quick, easy, simple setup, assuming you're using Apache for your web server(s), setup another server running nginx and then use proxy_pass to load balance traffic between multiple web servers. Example: https://gist.github.com/2f4118028ed04c40862e https://gist.github.com/2f4118028ed04c40862e I suggest doing more reading on nginx load balancing and PHP xdebug profiling