Question

I’ve been developing a web-site that uses Django and MySQL; what I want to know is how many HTTP requests my server can handle serving certain pages.

I have been using siege but I’m not sure if that’s a good benchmarking tool.

Answer 1

ab, the Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool. Many options. An example of use with ten concurrent requests:

% ab -n 20 -c 10 http://www.bortzmeyer.org/    
...

Benchmarking www.bortzmeyer.org (be patient).....done


Server Software:        Apache/2.2.9
Server Hostname:        www.bortzmeyer.org
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        208025 bytes

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   9.535 seconds
Complete requests:      20
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      4557691 bytes
HTML transferred:       4551113 bytes
Requests per second:    2.10 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       4767.540 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       476.754 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          466.79 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:       22  107 254.6     24     854
Processing:   996 3301 1837.9   3236    8139
Waiting:       23   25   1.3     25      27
Total:       1018 3408 1795.9   3269    8164

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%   3269
  66%   4219
...

(In that case, network latency was the main slowness factor.)

ab reports itself in the User-Agent field so, in the log of the HTTP server, you’ll see something like:

2001:660:3003:8::4:69 - - [28/Jul/2009:12:22:45 +0200] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 208025 "-" "ApacheBench/2.3" www.bortzmeyer.org