I'd like to see what I can do on the profiling end. I'm guessing it'll be limited to CPU, RAM, network, disk monitoring to see where the bottleneck is; but maybe I'll be able to go further.

Can someone help out by suggesting a large collection of ePubs that can be downloaded in one shot? Gutenberg is fine. Their site is less than clear on how to go about this though. (Text files, sure. DVDs with unspecified formats, sure. ePubs?)