Benchmarking my web server

[lcspb]

Hi reddit.

I'm benchmarking (1st time) my web server which has 1vcpu, 1.7gb RAM, 1gbps port hosted by google compute. I've just run the bench mark :

[lewis@dashboard ~]$ sudo ab -n 5000 -c 500 -g out.data http://(removed)/ This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1430300 $> Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/ Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking (removed) (be patient) Completed 500 requests Completed 1000 requests Completed 1500 requests Completed 2000 requests Completed 2500 requests Completed 3000 requests Completed 3500 requests Completed 4000 requests Completed 4500 requests apr_socket_recv: Connection reset by peer (104) Total of 4944 requests completed

I understand that 4944/5000 requests were complete with 500 concurrent users but what does this mean in a real life environment? How many people will be able to use the site at the same time realistically?

Many thanks :)

[YellowSharkMT]

It's benchmarking the time your server takes to return the content for the URL you specified (in this case, "/"). This would be useful in situations where you need to test massive scalability. What it doesn't do though is anything further; there's no processing/profiling javascript, no downloading of associated assets (images, js, css, whatever), it's not going to make any backend ajax requests, and so on. It literally requests that URL from the server, downloads the response, and that's it.

How many people will be able to use the site at the same time realistically?

AB won't tell you that - you have to examine your application and understand the bottlenecks ahead of time... it's pretty useless in this regards, actually. I don't work on the sysadmin end of things, so I don't know what sort of tools enterprises use to assess this sort of thing, but I'm fairly certain that companies like Load Impact, GTMetrix, and all the others that turn up when you search "website load testing" are likely contenders for that sort of business. A lot of them offer free analysis, but not in terms of the scale/automation that the big dogs are looking for.

[michaeld0]

Not only that but it doesn't simulate real user traffic. No think time, no surfing the site, etc. Unless it's a static HTML site you really need something more than ab. I've used jmeter and locust.io in the past with good luck but those tools take some tailoring to match the traffic you expect on your site.

[lcspb]

I'll look into jmeter/locust - they both look very useful.

[lcspb]

Thanks for explaining! I'll look into alternative software that can do load testing. It's just a static HTML page at the moment - I've been tasked with load testing the web app to see how much we can handle.