Magento & AWS EC2 / RDS Performance Tuning

The project scope includes two key tasks: 1. Magento performance testing of two scenarios on AWS EC2 & RDS options to reduce costs & improve performance. 2. Review of Magento website & server to identify recommendations for performance improvements. My website was originally setup using just an EC2 server running Percona on the same EC2 instance (about $120/mth). The website is now running on an EC2 server and RDS (about $230/mth) I would like to compare performance of both options (probably using [login to view URL] or other recommended tools). The website has about 250 visitors/day and about 6 transaction/day so I am hoping it may be possible to test using the live production website. So I think the steps would be: a) benchmark performance of current setup using EC2 & RDS b) RDS mysqldump and install into Percona on EC2 server c) Point store to Percona server & benchmark performance d) Review results and either leave on EC2 or move back to EC2 & RDS. The second task is to review the current Magento installation and make recommendations with explanations for performance improvements. Perhaps using the Magento profiler or any other tools as required. The website is using nginx, APC, memcahce, php-fpm, colin mollenheurs improved file cache for the front end. Excluded Scope : the implementation of the performance recommendations which will be a new project.