Web server benchmarking

Web server benchmarking is the process of estimating a web server performance in order to find if the server can serve sufficiently high workload.

Key parameters

The performance is usually measured in terms of:
* Number of requests that can be served per second (depending on the type of request, etc.);
* Latency response time in milliseconds for each new connection or request;
* Throughput in bytes per second (depending on file size, cached or not cached content, available network bandwidth, etc.).

The measurements must be performed under a varying load of clients and requests per client.

Tools for benchmarking

Load testing (stress/performance testing) a web server can be performed using automation/analysis tools such as:

* ApacheBench (or ab), a command line program bundled with Apache HTTP Server
* JMeter a Java GUI to make scenarios for several protocols: HTTP, AJP, JDBC...
* Siege_(software) a command line to test Web servers
* httperf
* http_load a command line tool that may fetch several urls (given by a file) by test, and runs on a single proccess
* Grinder, a Java / Jython performance testing tool [http://grinder.sourceforge.net/]
* Microsoft's Web Capacity Analysis Tool (WCAT), a part of IIS 6.0 Resource Kit [http://support.microsoft.com/kb/840671]
* Microsoft's Web Application Stress Tool (WAST, used to be called homer) [http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e2c0585a-062a-439e-a67d-75a89aa36495&DisplayLang=en]
* OpenSTA, distributed software testing architecture which can perform scripted HTTP and HTTPS heavy load tests with performance measurements from Win32 platforms [http://opensta.org/]
* Netwox, a network testing toolbox [http://www.laurentconstantin.com/en/netw/netwox/]
* RadView's WebLOAD [http://www.webload.org/]
* OpenWebLoad [http://openwebload.sourceforge.net/] a Linux|Windows command line tool

See also

* Load testing
* Software performance testing
* Benchmark (computing)

External links

* Microsoft's [http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb924375.aspx patterns & practices Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications]
* [http://support.microsoft.com/kb/231282 Stress tools to test your Web server] at Microsoft's knowledge base
* [http://www.opensourcetesting.org/performance.php Open Source Performance Testing tools]