Web server benchmarking

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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:

Apache JMeter, an open-source Java load testing tool
ApacheBench (or ab), a command line program bundled with Apache HTTP Server
Siege, an open-source web-server load testing and benchmarking tool
Wrk, an open-source C load testing tool^[1]
Locust, an open-source Python load testing tool^[2]

Web application benchmarks

Web application benchmarks measure the performance of application servers and database servers used to host web applications. TPC-W was a common benchmark emulating an online bookstore with synthetic workload generation.

References

^ "WRK - a HTTP benchmarking tool". GitHub. 28 May 2022.
^ "Open source load testing tool review 2020". k6.io. Retrieved 2023-06-02.

External links

[1] "WRK - a HTTP benchmarking tool". GitHub. 28 May 2022.

[2] "Open source load testing tool review 2020". k6.io. Retrieved 2023-06-02.

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