Benching marking your site responses using Apache WorkBench

Apache workbench is a dandy tool to quickly benchmark your site's responsiveness as well as detect any application level bottlenecks. Apache workbench depends on, Gnu C compiler (GCC), Apache Runtime (APR) and Apache Runtime utils (APR Utils). Typically, you want to get the latest and greatest of these packages, so we will look at downloading the latest versions and compiling them from source

If you are setting this up in a base linux instance, you may have to install gcc

• sudo yum install -y gcc

Now we can download and install apr and apr-utils

APR 1.5.1:-

• wget http://apache.tradebit.com/pub//apr/apr-1.5.1.tar.gz
• tar xvfz apr-1.5.1.tar.gz
• cd apr-1.5.1
• ./configure
• make
• sudo make install

NOTE - If you have not specified --prefix for the "configure", the pkg-config director for apr-1.pc will be /usr/local/apr/lib/pkgconfig/apr-1.pc. If you have other user installed libraries in /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/apr-1.pc, then you can link apr-1.pc as below

• sudo ln -s /usr/local/apr/lib/pkgconfig/apr-1.pc /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/apr-1.pc

APR-UTIL 1.5.4:-

• wget http://apache.tradebit.com/pub//apr/apr-util-1.5.4.tar.gz
• tar xvfz apr-util-1.5.4.tar.gz
• cd apr-util-1.5.4
• ./configure --with-apr=/usr/local/apr
• make
• sudo make install

Apache WorkBench 2.3:-

• wget https://apachebench-standalone.googlecode.com/files/ab-standalone-0.1.tar.bz2
• bzip2 ab-standalone-0.1.tar.bz2
• tar xvf ab-standalone-0.1.tar
• export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
• make ab

Once you have made done the above configuration, you could quickly benchmark your site's responsive by running the below command:-

$ ./ab -c 100 -n 100000 -H "User-Agent:Load-Test" -k http://<your site>/<test page>.html

This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision$>

Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/

Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking <your site> (be patient)

Completed 10000 requests

Completed 20000 requests

Completed 30000 requests

Completed 40000 requests

Completed 50000 requests

Completed 60000 requests

Completed 70000 requests

Completed 80000 requests

Completed 90000 requests

Completed 100000 requests

Finished 100000 requests

Server Software:        Apache-Coyote/1.1

Server Hostname:        <your host name>

Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /<test page>.html

Document Length:        209 bytes

Concurrency Level:      100

Time taken for tests:   134.133 seconds

Complete requests:      100000

Failed requests:        0

Write errors:           0

Keep-Alive requests:    42518

Total transferred:      36005468 bytes

HTML transferred:       20900000 bytes

Requests per second:    745.53 [#/sec] (mean)

Time per request:       134.133 [ms] (mean)

Time per request:       1.341 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

Transfer rate:          262.14 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms) min  mean[+/-sd] median   max

Connect:        0    1   7.5      1    1002

Processing:    17  133  65.8    119     740

Waiting:       17  133  65.7    119     740

Total:         17  134  66.1    120    1188

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)

  50%    120

  66%    145

  75%    160

  80%    169

  90%    201

  95%    241

  98%    330

  99%    421

 100%   1188 (longest request)