Question

I am trying my hand at various benchmarking tools for the website I am working on and have found Apache Bench (ab) to be an excellent tool for load testing. It is a command line tool and is very easy to use, apparently. However I have a doubt about two of its basic flags. The site I was reading says:

Suppose we want to see how fast Yahoo can handle 100 requests, with a maximum of 10 requests running concurrently:

ab -n 100 -c 10 http://www.yahoo.com/

and the explanation for the flags states:

Usage: ab [options] [http[s]://]hostname[:port]/path
Options are:
    -n requests     Number of requests to perform
    -c concurrency  Number of multiple requests to make

I guess I am just not able to wrap my head around number of requests to perform and number of multiple requests to make. What happens when I give them both together like in the example above?

Can anyone give me a simpler explanation of what these two flags do together?

Answer 1

-n 100 -c 10 means “issue 100 requests, 10 at a time.”