I recently had the need to stress test a hard drive because I thought it was failing and needed to prove that to a dedicated server provider. I wasn’t able to replicate the problems I had been seeing with straight file copies and such, so I decided to really hit the disk with a benchmarker. bonnie++ did the trick. Within 5 minutes, I was able to duplicate the errors I had seen during heavy load of the disk. I could then phone up the dedicated provider and tell them to replace the disk. So, if you’re in need of a benchmarking tool, or just something to put some heavy load on a disk, check out bonnie++. Available in /usr/ports/benchmarks/bonnie++/ for those with a superior operating system.

Textpattern, out of the box, is a very fast CMS. In fact, when comparing it to other content management systems, it wins hands down in most cases. Even given this great out of the box performance, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to serve pages even faster? I decided to see just want tweaks would speed up Textpattern, and what wouldn’t. Read on to see what I tried and how it affected the number of pages served.

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