Website Monitoring Blog

Often we need to measure web server performance. There are various reasons for this, but the most frequent one is modification of configuration files. Quite often we look for ways of improving web server speed and performance: tuning up nginx, apache or lighttpd we can get a significant performance boost. But finally we come to the question: how can we measure web server performance?

The first method is external load/stress testing – great solution for commercial projects. But there is also another good way for Apache – it’s open-source and free, called ApacheBench. It’s incredibly easy to use:

#ab -c10 -n3000 http://www.fastmonitoring.com/

• ab the name of the program
• C10 means the number of threads
• n3000 is the number of requests.

The program has a great variety of additional parameters — just check the official documentation. You can use cookies, POST requests, modified headers — everything that will help to simulate server users activity.

The program output is quite comprehensive:

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        121779 bytes
Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   211.255212 seconds
Complete requests:      3000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      63177000 bytes
HTML transferred:       63171000 bytes
Requests per second:    10.41 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       480.425 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       96.085 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          226.23 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   0.5      0      19
Processing:   181  479 186.0    444    1822
Waiting:      166  461 184.7    427    1708
Total:        181  479 186.0    444    1822
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50%    444
66%    525
75%    577
80%    619
90%    732
95%    819
98%    946
99%   1012
100%   1822 (longest request)

Highly recommended.

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