I got curious and started load testing my blog using the Apache ab load testing tool.  I didn’t have any caching setup when I first ran ab.

$ab -kc 10 -t 10 http://www.alexloddengaard.com/

Requests per second:    8.19 [#/sec] (mean)

During the ab run my server’s CPU usage was at about 99%.  That’s insanely awful considering my web server is monsterious, at least to my standards.  I installed the WP-Cache WordPress caching plugin to see how that would improve things.  Take a look:

$ab -kc 10 -t 10 http://www.alexloddengaard.com/

Requests per second:    44.60 [#/sec] (mean)

The CPU usage during this ab run was about 3%; much better :).  I was curious to see how many requests per second my machine could handle ignoring network latency, so I ran ab from my server on itself and got a much more impressive result:

$ab -kc 100 -t 30 http://www.alexloddengaard.com/

Requests per second:    1140.20 [#/sec] (mean)

Lesson learned: WP-Cache is a must-install WordPress plugin.