Using ApacheBench for benchmarking

ApacheBench (ab) is a tool for benchmarking your Apache HTTP server. It is designed to give you an idea of the performance that your current Apache installation can give. In particular, it shows you how many requests per second your Apache server is capable of serving. The ab tool comes bundled with the Apache source distribution.

Let's try it. We will simulate 10 users concurrently requesting a very light script at www.example.com/perl/test.pl. Each simulated user makes 10 requests.

  % ./ab -n 100 -c 10 www.example.com/perl/test.pl

The results are:

  Document Path:          /perl/test.pl
  Document Length:        319 bytes
  
  Concurrency Level:      10
  Time taken for tests:   0.715 seconds
  Complete requests:      100
  Failed requests:        0
  Total transferred:      60700 bytes
  HTML transferred:       31900 bytes
  Requests per second:    139.86
  Transfer rate:          84.90 kb/s received
  
  Connection Times (ms)
                min   avg   max
  Connect:        0     0     3
  Processing:    13    67    71
  Total:         13    67    74

We can see that under load of ten concurrent users our server is capable of processing 140 requests per second. Of course this benchmark is correct only when the script under test is used. We can also learn about the average processing time, which in this case was 67 milli-seconds. Other numbers reported by ab may or may not be of interest to you.

For example if we believe that the script perl/test.pl is not efficient we will try to improve it and run the benchmark again, to see whether we have any improve in performance.

HTTPD::Bench::ApacheBench, available from CPAN, provides a Perl interface for ab.