Brandon Yarbrough's questions

I regularly invoke a particular remote server from a (Linux/bash) command line via tools like cURL or wget. This server requires an authentication token that expires every 10 minutes. I have a program that can generate a new token.

What I would like is an environment variable, $TOKEN, that I can use from the command line, that refreshes itself every 10 minutes, or, better yet, refreshes itself only when requested, and even then only every 10 minutes at most.

I was hoping that there was a way to tie an environment variable's evaluation to an executable, allowing me to do so with a script. Failing that, I was wondering if perhaps there was a way to set up a background process that updated the environment variable every 10 minutes.

I'm testing out various Ruby on Rails hosting solutions, including nginx, apache, a couple of various ISPs and cloud computing systems, etc.

I'm noticing that, when there's only one or two simultaneous requests being handled, the average response time for those requests is often tiny (<10ms). However, I can only handle so much traffic like that. But if I am trying to maximize the number of requests per second, the average response time grows quite quickly. For instance, one one server, I found that the greatest number of requests/second was reached at around 16 simultaneous requests going on at any one moment. However, at this point, the average response time was over 200ms.

I wonder, what tricks and tips do you web server gurus have to balance between response time and requests per second?

My website is growing too large for the one webserver that powers it to handle the traffic. Anticipating this, the code is perfectly capable of running in parallel, sharing a database, but I've never actually tried to split one IP address among several webservers. What kind of hardware or software do I need to divide up incoming TCP connections between multiple boxes? Bonus points if the system can detect that one or more boxes has gone offline.

There are a handful of different standard desktops and laptops at my company that I could choose from for developers on my team. Each is from a different company and comes with different load-outs of CPU, RAM, OS, etc. I'd like a test to determine which one of them will run Eclipse most quickly with some sort of impartial test. Since the task most critical to our team is running Java programs, I was considering using SciMark 2 scores. Is this a relatively good rough idea of how Eclipse will perform of this machine, or is there a better way?