Loadtruck115

• Apache Bench Example
• Apache Benchmark Ab

You can benchmark Apache, IIS and other web server with apache benchmarking tool called ab. Recently I was asked to performance benchmarks for different web servers. It is true that benchmarking a web server is not an easy task. From how to benchmark a web server: First, benchmarking a web server is not an easy thing. The apache benchmark tool is very basic, and while it will give you a solid idea of some performance, it is a bad idea to only depend on it if you plan to have your site exposed to serious stress in production. Having said that, here's the most common and simplest parameters. Note for future visitors of this gist: Mac OS has Apache Benchmark by default ab -help. Edit 2020: this is popular! Glad my comment saved a tiny bit of time for so many people. Ab (Apache Benchmark) is a tool for benchmarking your Apache Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server. It provides a quick an easy way to evaluate your http serving capabilities. Ab overloads the server with http requests and measures the time it takes to serve all those requests. Ab is a benchmarking tool for web server that normally comes standard with Apache installation. It's used for load-testing your web server and produce useful metrics such as the number of requests per second that the server is able to serve.

Apache Bench – Setting Multiple Cookies

by Jason on October 12, 2011

Recently I’ve been doing some load testing on some web applications I’ve developed.

Reading the documentation they say you can set multiple cookies using multiple “-C” flags. However, this simply DID NOT WORK for me. Tried everything.

Since I’m sure others have run into this I’m offering an alternative.
Simply set the Cookies in a header.

Example:

ab -c 5 -n 100 -H “Cookie: PHPSESSID=115821732; another_cookie=asdfasdfasdf”

Happy load testing!

Apache Bench Example

Options

Apache Benchmark Ab

-A auth-username:password

Supply BASIC Authentication credentials to the server. The username and password are separated by a single : and sent on the wire base64 encoded. The string is sent regardless of whether the server needs it (i.e., has sent an 401 authentication needed).

-b windowsize

Size of TCP send/receive buffer, in bytes.

-B local-address

Address to bind to when making outgoing connections.

-c concurrency

Number of multiple requests to perform at a time. Default is one request at a time.

-C cookie-name=value

Add a Cookie: line to the request. The argument is typically in the form of a name=value pair. This field is repeatable.

-d

Do not display the 'percentage served within XX [ms] table'. (legacy support).

-e csv-file

Write a Comma separated value (CSV) file which contains for each percentage (from 1% to 100%) the time (in milliseconds) it took to serve that percentage of the requests. This is usually more useful than the 'gnuplot' file; as the results are already 'binned'.

-E client-certificate-file

When connecting to an SSL website, use the provided client certificate in PEM format to authenticate with the server. The file is expected to contain the client certificate, followed by intermediate certificates, followed by the private key. Available in 2.4.36 and later.

-f protocol

Specify SSL/TLS protocol (SSL2, SSL3, TLS1, TLS1.1, TLS1.2, or ALL). TLS1.1 and TLS1.2 support available in 2.4.4 and later.

-g gnuplot-file

Write all measured values out as a 'gnuplot' or TSV (Tab separate values) file. This file can easily be imported into packages like Gnuplot, IDL, Mathematica, Igor or even Excel. The labels are on the first line of the file.

-h

Display usage information.

-H custom-header

Append extra headers to the request. The argument is typically in the form of a valid header line, containing a colon-separated field-value pair (i.e., 'Accept-Encoding: zip/zop;8bit').

-i

Do HEAD requests instead of GET.

-k

Enable the HTTP KeepAlive feature, i.e., perform multiple requests within one HTTP session. Default is no KeepAlive.

-l

Do not report errors if the length of the responses is not constant. This can be useful for dynamic pages. Available in 2.4.7 and later.

-m HTTP-method

Custom HTTP method for the requests. Available in 2.4.10 and later.

-n requests

Number of requests to perform for the benchmarking session. The default is to just perform a single request which usually leads to non-representative benchmarking results.

-p POST-file

File containing data to POST. Remember to also set -T.

-P proxy-auth-username:password

Supply BASIC Authentication credentials to a proxy en-route. The username and password are separated by a single : and sent on the wire base64 encoded. The string is sent regardless of whether the proxy needs it (i.e., has sent an 407 proxy authentication needed).

-q

When processing more than 150 requests, ab outputs a progress count on stderr every 10% or 100 requests or so. The -q flag will suppress these messages.

-r

Don't exit on socket receive errors.

-s timeout

Maximum number of seconds to wait before the socket times out. Default is 30 seconds. Available in 2.4.4 and later.

-S

Do not display the median and standard deviation values, nor display the warning/error messages when the average and median are more than one or two times the standard deviation apart. And default to the min/avg/max values. (legacy support).

-t timelimit

Maximum number of seconds to spend for benchmarking. This implies a -n 50000 internally. Use this to benchmark the server within a fixed total amount of time. Per default there is no timelimit.

-T content-type

Content-type header to use for POST/PUT data, eg. application/x-www-form-urlencoded. Default is text/plain.

-u PUT-file

File containing data to PUT. Remember to also set -T.

-v verbosity

Set verbosity level - 4 and above prints information on headers, 3 and above prints response codes (404, 200, etc.), 2 and above prints warnings and info.

-V

Display version number and exit.

-w

Print out results in HTML tables. Default table is two columns wide, with a white background.

-x <table>-attributes

String to use as attributes for <table>. Attributes are inserted <table here >.

-X proxy[:port]

Use a proxy server for the requests.

-y <tr>-attributes

String to use as attributes for <tr>.

-z <td>-attributes

String to use as attributes for <td>.

-Z ciphersuite

Specify SSL/TLS cipher suite (See openssl ciphers)