Hey All,

I read up on using the apache benchmark (ab) tool, and I found quite a surprise, I seem to be having some issues with request failing due to length.

root@girls [/etc/apache2]# ab -c 1 -n 10 www.girls-on-bikes.com/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.41-dev <$Revision: 1.141 $> apache-2.0
Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright (c) 1998-2002 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking www.girls-on-bikes.com (be patient).....done


Server Software:        Apache/2.0.53
Server Hostname:        www.girls-on-bikes.com
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        29425 bytes

Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   14.482593 seconds
Complete requests:      10
Failed requests:        9
   (Connect: 0, Length: 9, Exceptions: 0)
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      299966 bytes
HTML transferred:       294456 bytes
Requests per second:    0.69 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       1448.259 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       1448.259 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          20.16 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   0.7      0       2
Processing:   717 1446 707.6   1451    2718
Waiting:      709 1433 708.5   1382    2714
Total:        717 1446 707.6   1451    2718

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%   1451
  66%   1641
  75%   1837
  80%   2418
  90%   2718
  95%   2718
  98%   2718
  99%   2718
 100%   2718 (longest request)

Any ideas what to check first?

May not actually be a problem. Reason? It might be a site that serves dynamic context (such as different cookie IDs mentioned) where the file size changes between each query.

http://www.celebrazio.net/tech/unix/apache_bench.html

Easy way to verify:

$ wget <url>

Repeat that twice, then:

$ diff <retrieved filename> <retrieved filename>.1

See if there are differences. If yes, then you can ignore the length-related failures. If no, it's some other cause and need to investigate further.

Ahh I see, I'll have to read up on that more, but that appears to be the issue.

I did wget twice, and there were large differences in the files. The content is indeed dynamically created, and includes sessionid's in the code, so I see how that would cause the length issues.

I would like to benchmark my apache installation if possible. Do you know of any benchmarkers that could be used with dynamic content?

Thanks,
-Kevin

siege 2.61 might. Not sure.

sarge,

Thank you for the suggestion on the siege program, this seems to be working.