-A Performance Question

mattee

One of the pages on our site is nearly 2000 lines including the include files of which there are 5.

The page makes a db connection to postgresql and issues 6 different selects of which 4 perform some table joins (no more than 2-3 tables joined at a time) Plus there is at least one insert happening.

php4
Apache/1.3.14

According to my simple benchmarking code, the page completes execution in about: 0.331179022789 seconds.

Browsing, I don't find that the page is slow at all, but I'm wondering what might happen under load.

I realize there are many other factors that affect performance, but I'm just trying to get opinions on whether folks feel this is especially slow, or fast, or average? Your input would be appreciated.

Anyone have ideas about how to test a page under load? Are there tools built for this task?

Thanks,
Matt.

[deleted]

Wether 0.3 seconds is slow or fast depends completely on what it is you do in your page, and what hardware you are running on. If you have a sleep(100) then executing that in 0.3 seconds is extraordinarily fast. If you were just printing "hello world" I'd be getting worried.

Also your database, you are joining tables, but how many records per table? a join on how many fields? ordered? limited? indexed tables?

A gazillion factors that make it impossible to tell if 0.3 seconds is fast or slow.

There are a few load-testing tools out there.
The simplest I guess is 'ab' that comes with the apache webserver.
That can give your server a nice beating and record the time taken for each page to load. It repost the results (slowest, fastest and average time taken).

mattee

Quite right, I figured it was too obtuse a question to get any kind of accurate answer.

How do I use the ab program you mention? I'm running on apache.

[deleted]

The use of AB is expolained by AB itself, or check the apache website for more info.

roel_v

A nice stress testing tool (besides the ones that come with apache) is Siege. Check it on freshmeat.
There once was an article here on phpbuilder about profiling applications, with a class to do it, if you think your application is too slow you can use it to track down the bottleneck(s).