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.

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
Grinder, a Java / Jython performance testing tool[1]
Microsoft's Web Capacity Analysis Tool (WCAT), a part of IIS 6.0 Resource Kit[2]
Microsoft's Web Application Stress Tool (WAST, used to be called homer)[3]
OpenSTA, distributed software testing architecture which can perform scripted HTTP and HTTPS heavy load tests with performance measurements from Win32 platforms [4]
Netwox, a network testing toolbox[5]