ApacheBench, accurate results?

[Anon]

Right now I am running

ab -n 100 -c 1 http://localhost/whatever.php

I'm sure this is too few to get accurate results, but I don't want overkill. What do the rest of you run?

[smarlowe]

ab -n 1000 -c 5

is a good starting point. See how it behaves as you crank up concurrents. Most apps should be able to hand 20 or more simos with no sweat, even on a P100 with 64 megs ram.

Note that the -k switch (keepalive) may also help get you better and more realistic numbers since most browsers support keep alive.

[smarlowe]

Please note that apachebench (ab) is primarily designed to stress an apache install, not benchmark it. I.e. the numbers it gives are useful, in a relative sense, but more important is the beating you can administer to your server to see what's gonna break under heavy parallel and / or serial load.