Benchmarking

gerardg

Anybody know of some urls (or even offer some help!) that deal with benchmarking scripts (hopefully even php related)? I'd like to get a rough estimate of what sort of traffic my scripts can handle.

[deleted]

benchmarking is useless, try a stresstest instead.

Benchmarking your script will tell you how fast one script is when it is running on an idle server. A stresstest will show you how fast your pages are when your server gets maxed-out.

Look for programs like Apache's 'AB'.

gerardg

I'm not sure what to make of it:

[admin ~]$ /usr/sbin/ab -n 50 -c 1 www.domain.com/index.php

This is ApacheBench, Version 1.3c <$Revision: 1.41 $> apache-1.3
Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright (c) 1998-1999 The Apache Group, http://www.apache.org/

Server Software: Apache/1.3.14
Server Hostname: www.domain.com
Server Port: 80

Document Path: /index.php
Document Length: 34079 bytes

Concurrency Level: 1
Time taken for tests: 2.503 seconds
Complete requests: 50
Failed requests: 49
(Connect: 0, Length: 49, Exceptions: 0)
Total transferred: 1708234 bytes
HTML transferred: 1699034 bytes
Requests per second: 19.98
Transfer rate: 682.47 kb/s received

Connnection Times (ms)
min avg max
Connect: 0 0 0
Processing: 42 49 88
Total: 42 49 88

49 failed requests?? I ran ab on the same server as the site (I know you said not to do this) - is this why? How do you guesstimate what volume of traffic a site can handle based on ab?

[deleted]

I'm not sure about the failed request, check your webserver's logs to see what happened.

About the traffic; the requests per second and total avg time give you an indication of what it can handle.

The point is that you should not try to find out how fast a page is and multiply that by X to see how many you can handle. Instead, load the server with the traffic you expect to handle/want to be able to handle, and see if your server responds fast enough.

If you run AB with 10 concurrent processes and pageloads start taking 30 seconds each, you're in trouble.

Your test used -c 1, which means it does all the requests in sequence. That means each request can use 100% of the cpu. You should increase the concurrency to 10 or 20 to get some real-world figures.

Another nice test is to load the server using AB (give it a few hundred requests per thread) and while it is running, use your browser to browse your site. Then you can clearly see how 'slow' your pages are under stress.

gerardg

Nothing in the error log.

[thsadmin ~/weblogs]$ /usr/sbin/ab -n 2000 -c 20 www.domain.com/index.php

Server Software: Apache/1.3.14
Server Hostname: www.domain.com
Server Port: 80

Document Path: /index.php
Document Length: 33919 bytes

Concurrency Level: 20
Time taken for tests: 100.614 seconds
Complete requests: 2000
Failed requests: 1999
(Connect: 0, Length: 1999, Exceptions: 0)
Total transferred: 67851777 bytes
HTML transferred: 67483777 bytes
Requests per second: 19.88
Transfer rate: 674.38 kb/s received

Connnection Times (ms)
min avg max
Connect: 0 0 65
Processing: 160 1001 2918
Total: 160 1001 2983

Pages were still pretty responsive during the test - 5-10 seconds. Is there a way to get a max uniques/page per hour from this?

Actually, this is a bit of a tangent - I'm really interested in being able to provide a daily uniques/pageviews for my scripts. A bonehead is claiming one is maxing out their cpu, and I'd like to be able to present some numbers that the script should be able to handle (I think their sysadmin skills need tuning :-).