First, benchmarking a web server is not an easy thing. To benchmark a web server the time it will take to give a page is not important: you don't care if a user can have his page in 0.1 ms or in 0.05 ms as nobody can have such delays on the Internet.

Apache Benchmark Procedures

• You need to use same hardware configuration and kernel (OS) for all tests
• You need to use same network configuration. For example, use 100Mbps port for all tests
• First record server load using top or uptime command
• Take at least 3-5 readings and use the best result
• After each test reboot the server and carry out test on next configuration (web server)
• Again record server load using top or uptime command
• Carry on test using static html/php files and dynamic pages
• It also important to carry out test using the Non-KeepAlive and KeepAlive (the Keep-Alive extension to provide long-lived HTTP sessions, which allow multiple requests to be sent over the same TCP connection) features
• Also don't forget to carry out test using fast-cgi and/or perl tests

Webserver Benchmark Examples:

Static Non-KeepAlive test for Apache web server

PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">





This is a webserver test page.


 

• -n 1000: ab will send 1000 number of requests to server 202.54.200.1 in order to perform for the benchmarking session
• -c 5 : 5 is concurrency number i.e. ab will send 5 number of multiple requests to perform at a time to server 202.54.200.1

This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.41-dev <$Revision: 1.141 $> apache-2.0
Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright (c) 1998-2002 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking www.cyberciti.biz (be patient).....done
Server Software:
Server Hostname:        www.somewhere.com
Server Port:            80
Document Path:          /
Document Length:        16289 bytes
Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   16.885975 seconds
Complete requests:      10
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      166570 bytes
HTML transferred:       162890 bytes
Requests per second:    0.59 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       1688.597 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       1688.597 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          9.59 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:      353  375  16.1    386     391
Processing:  1240 1312  52.1   1339    1369
Waiting:      449  472  16.2    476     499
Total:       1593 1687  67.7   1730    1756
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%   1730
  66%   1733
  75%   1741
  80%   1753
  90%   1756
  95%   1756
  98%   1756
  99%   1756
 100%   1756 (longest request)

Static Non-KeepAlive test for lighttpd web server

How do I carry out Web server Static KeepAlive test?

How do I save result as a Comma separated value?

How do I import result into excel or gnuplot programs so that I can create graphs?

Sample test.php file

#!/usr/bin/perl
$command=`perl -v`;
$title = "Perl Version";
 
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "\n\n\n";
 
print "
$title
 
\n";
print $command;
 
print "\n\n";
 

Sample psql.php (php+mysql) file

   $link = mysql_connect("localhost", "USERNAME", "PASSWORD");
   mysql_select_db("DATABASE");
 
   $query = "SELECT * FROM TABLENAME";
   $result = mysql_query($query);
 
   while ($line = mysql_fetch_array($result))
   {
      foreach ($line as $value)
       {
         print "$value\n";
      }
   }
 
    mysql_close($link);
?>


 

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