One of the first things you need to know are the limits of the current website. How much capacity has my website got? What is slowing down my site? We have to get an overview of all these aspects to arrive at a conclusion of which optimizations will have the most effect.
In this recipe, we will see some tools that help to create a view of the performance. Some of the tools are listed as follows:
ApacheBench
Siege
Magento Profiler
YSlow
PageSpeed
GTmetrix
WebPagetest
We will do some tests with all these tools to work out the pitfalls of a Magento store. With these results, we can find out what kind of optimizations have the most effect.
Some optimizations are very easy and can have a large effect. Other optimizations are difficult and can have less effect. It is on you to decide what you want.