[eluser]Eric Brown[/eluser]
I have an application written in CodeIgniter running on 2 web nodes and 1 db node on the cloud at VPS.net. The response time for all processing ranges between 60 and 80 ms for a single request. I need to get it down to 30 or 40.
When I do load testing the response time increases to 300 to 500ms and is steady around there. My node usage can jump up to 10 nodes on the web VPS while the db node seems unaffected which makes sense since it's just making writes to the db.
My question is, since the web node scales up automatically to 10 nodes to handle the heavy load, will buying the nodes so I am guaranteed their resources have any affect? What if I scale my VPS up to 60 nodes?
I can't tell if "throwing more hardware" at my app will have any affect or if it's simply going as fast as it can and I need to rewrite my app.
