I began a wiki question for this purpose serverfault.com/q/350454/50875. I'd love to see this addition!

Would it be reasonable to send a message to the OP a link to the FAQ in cases where they are closed as NARQ?

What about vgv8?

Well done, sir! I came back from dinner to a masterpiece! I'll add some links for a couple other toos once I'm on at a full machine.

...and one for Databases: serverfault.com/q/350458/50875

Question posted: serverfault.com/q/350454/50875

Ok, I'm with you there, but the answerer has to preface their answer of helpful tools with 'you need to determine that yourself; only you know your environment, but I recommend that you use these: ...'

Not being a Mod myself, is a periodic review of the FAQ occur, just to ensure that it still makes sense? The thinking being that is for instance this suggestion were applied, but found that it caused undue friction/pain it could be reviewed and rescinded?

I myself think that the second question is better worded, but really the answer is the same for both: you need to test your environment yourself. I think that that is a reasonable general-purpose answer that fits every case (and so, meets FAQ criteria.) questions about tools and methods of benchmarking / capacity-planning are welcome, however.

Asking about benchmarking / load-testing tools seems fine to me, but that question will only be asked for/about so many apps/environments before fairly definitive answers are available (and new ones can be closed as duplicates.)

I think that noting that theirs isn't a formulaic question is a good start, then offer suggestions that they begin by searching for 'Capacity planning,' 'load testing', etc with the specifics of their environment. I agree that link-rot is to be avoided, and I have mixed feelings about recommending books (especially when they get to be more than a couple of years old.)

I'm sure that there are approximately gigs of text on the internet describing people's capacity planning and scaling experiences. "Capacity planning" in Google yields About 17,700,000 results. O'Reilly's "Art of Capacity Planning" shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596518585.do, and a 2002 book called "System Performance Tuning" all come up with easy keyword searches...

John Gardeniers' answer makes me feel somewhat validated that I'm not completely insane. I took a quick look at tag-sets per sysadmin1138's suggestion. Upon first glance, it looks like a hack, but I think that it bears actually trying out.