Load testing Apache?

Post by **Lucifer** » Fri Dec 09, 2005 4:20 am

Does anyone know how I could go about load testing apache?

I just noticed that my web server was performing *very* poorly and spend a few minutes tuning it. I waited 10 minutes for it to unswap and shut down! No pages were being served. Ack, what a pain. Anyway, it's a lot more responsive now, but I'd like to tune it some more.

So I need some way to put it under load and monitor how it performs. Anybody know how to do that? I suppose some scripts could monitor apache's performance using top or ps, and another script could use lynx or wget to cause a bunch of connections, but I'm looking for a ready-made package, not something I have to hack together.

Matrox · Post by **Matrox** » Sat Dec 10, 2005 1:04 am

This may be what your looking for: http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/index.html

Apache JMeter wrote: Apache JMeter may be used to test performance both on static and dynamic resources (files, Servlets, Perl scripts, Java Objects, Data Bases and Queries, FTP Servers and more). It can be used to simulate a heavy load on a server, network or object to test its strength or to analyze overall performance under different load types. You can use it to make a graphical analysis of performance or to test your server/script/object behavior under heavy concurrent load.

This perl api "Apache Bench" may be of use to you: http://search.cpan.org/~adiraj/ApacheBench-0.63/

Also, have a look here: http://httpd.apache.org/test/