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Apache Benchmark

 
  • Feb 22, 2023

Some details about Apache Benchmark tool.

Useful documentation:

Apache Benchmark (also named ab) is a tool for benchmarking HTTP servers. It is very useful to simulate load on a server and see how it reacts.

Installation

To install ab on Linux:

# On debian based distrib
sudo apt install apache2-utils

# On fedora/centos/rhel distrib
sudo yum install httpd-tools

Check the installed version

ab -V

Usage

Here is the usage of ab:

ab [options] [http[s]://]hostname[:port]/path

The Hostname/IP must end with a trailing slash!

The most useful options of ab are:

  • -n <requests>: Number of requests to perform
  • -c <concurrency>: Number of concurrent requests to perform
  • -t <timelimit>: Maximum number of second the benchmark will run. The benchmark will stop even if the number of requests isn’t reached within this time.
  • -H <header>: Add an HTTP header to the requests (e.g. "Accept: application/json"). Can be used multiple times

Get the full options list with man ab.

Requests examples:

# Benchmark 1000 requests, with 15 concurrent requests, during at most 10 seconds
ab -t 10 -n 1000 -c 15 https://my-server.com/

# Same benchmark, sending POST to endpoint with authentication
ab -t 10 -n 1000 -c 15 -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_TOKEN" -T "application/json" -p data.json https://my-server.com/api/v1/endpoint

Result example:

This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1843412 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking my-server.com (be patient)
Completed 100 requests
Completed 200 requests
Completed 300 requests
Completed 400 requests
Completed 500 requests
Finished 500 requests


Server Software:        gunicorn
Server Hostname:        my-server.com
Server Port:            443
SSL/TLS Protocol:       TLSv1.2,ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256,4096,128
Server Temp Key:        X25519 253 bits
TLS Server Name:        my-server.com

Document Path:          /api/v1/endpoint
Document Length:        39 bytes

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   3.129 seconds
Complete requests:      500
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      206000 bytes
Total body sent:        157500
HTML transferred:       19500 bytes
Requests per second:    159.80 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       62.577 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       6.258 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          64.30 [Kbytes/sec] received
                        49.16 kb/s sent
                        113.45 kb/s total

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        9   15   5.1     14      38
Processing:    14   46   8.9     46      87
Waiting:       14   45   9.0     46      87
Total:         25   62   9.1     61     105

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%     61
  66%     65
  75%     68
  80%     69
  90%     72
  95%     76
  98%     82
  99%     85
 100%    105 (longest request)
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