Wow, Merb really is fast

I am re-writing a quick one or two evening hack from 3 years ago (RubyPlanet.net) in Ruby + Merb. I originally wrote this web site in Java - humorous since it is a Ruby blog feed aggregator :-)

I am also using this as the example program for a DevX article on Merb that I am working on. I just did a very quick first cut at the example program for the article (i.e., what soon will be the new RubyPlanet.net) and without doing any caching and hitting a database a lot, I was surprised to see that 
ab -n 5 http://localhost:4000/
showed 44 page requests per second. My goal is to get 100 to 200 page requests handled per second (depending on the number of blog entries on the main page) using a single process on my MacBook, and that looks like it may be easy. Deployed on a very low cost VPS with a bunch of other applications, this web app may not be all that fast "out in the field" but I want that to be a limitation of the server, not the code.

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