EDITED -- test running from localhost now to rule out network... i have a c1.medium using EBS. when i do an apache benchmark and i'm just printing a "hello" for the test from localhost - no database hits, it's very slow. i can repeat this test many times with the same results. any thoughts? thanks in advance. ab -n 1000 -c 100 http://localhost/home/test/ Benchmarking localhost (be patient) Completed 100 requests Completed 200 requests Completed 300 requests Completed 400 requests Completed 500 requests Completed 600 requests Completed 700 requests Completed 800 requests Completed 900 requests Completed 1000 requests Finished 1000 requests Server Software: Apache/2.2.23 Server Hostname: localhost Server Port: 80 Document Path: /home/test/ Document Length: 5 bytes Concurrency Level: 100 Time taken for tests: 25.300 seconds Complete requests: 1000 Failed requests: 0 Write errors: 0 Total transferred: 816000 bytes HTML transferred: 5000 bytes Requests per second: 39.53 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 2530.037 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 25.300 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 31.50 [Kbytes/sec] received Connection Times (ms) min mean[+/-sd] median max Connect: 0 7 21.0 0 73 Processing: 81 2489 665.7 2500 4057 Waiting: 80 2443 654.0 2445 4057 Total: 85 2496 653.5 2500 4057 Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms) 50% 2500 66% 2651 75% 2842 80% 2932 90% 3301 95% 3506 98% 3762 99% 3838 100% 4057 (longest request)