All-
I'm hosting on AWS EC2 (on the free tier with a t1.micro instance)- running Linux/PHP/Apache/MySql installed myself. My current max. send rate is 28/second. After switching over from GoDaddy shared hosting, I saw a big boost in how fast I was able to send (meaning the t1.micro is giving me much more processing power as expected). Currently I'm able to send at ~16k/hour on a sustained basis. I went through a lot of tweaking on the server, which got me much higher throughput on web visits, but didn't do anything for me in terms of being able to send quicker. Then I moved the Sendy db over to RDS (again, free micro tier), thinking offloading some of the db processing might have helped- but it didn't. During a send, my EC2 CPU quickly goes to 100% and stays there (RDS CPU stays between 25% and 50% during the send).
Any ideas here on anything I could do to eek out quicker sends, while keeping my same tier of hosting? To me this is clearly a CPU bottleneck but wanted to put this out there just in case. My list is just email address and no other fields, and the only dynamic field in the creative is the unsubscribe link (not using webversion for the moment). My HTML is 11k. The one other thing I can think of to try is to move my EC2 (and RDS) instance to the East zone where SES sits- it's currently in Oregon and didn't think ahead to keep everything in the same zone.
Thanks!