http_load - another webserver peformance tester

Posted: June 7th, 2008 | Author: sofia | Filed under: open, performance, tech | Tags: performance, tools |

Http_load is another cool webserver performance tester that gives simple stats on how your webapp is performing.

How to install in OS X

1. Download from http://www.acme.com/software/http_load/
2. Open terminal, cd to the directory where the archive is and unzip
   $ tar xvzf http_load-12mar2006.tar.gz

3. Move to that directory
   $ cd http_load-12mar2006
4. Run
   $ make
5. Run
   $ sudo make install

You’re ready! Open up a text editor and write down the website’s url you want to test (your own preferably), then cd to the directory where the .txt is and run
$ http_load -parallel 5 -fetches 100 name_of_file.txt
which means open 5 concurrent connections and fetch the webpage 100 times.

You’ll get something like this:

100 fetches, 5 max parallel, 1.34237e+07 bytes, in 15.842 seconds
134237 mean bytes/connection
6.31234 fetches/sec, 847351 bytes/sec
msecs/connect: 28.9069 mean, 75.011 max, 14.865 min
msecs/first-response: 435.84 mean, 2484.28 max, 96.082 min
93 bad byte counts
HTTP response codes:
code 200 — 100

I highlighted the important bits. At the moment the webserver is capable of handling 6 requests per second and has a mean average initial latency of 435 milliseconds.

Http_load tells you how your webapp is currently performing allowing you to test it under different conditions, basically it’s a benchmarking tool juts like httperf i covered here. The next step is optimization. Have a look at the 1st part of  Getting Rich with PHP 5 (what a crappy title) by rasmus lerdorf  for tools you can use to profile your code and some tips on optimization. In the example shown he goes from 17 reqs/sec to 1100 reqs/sec .

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