Quick Guide to Using Apache Benchmark (ab)
Updated: 2000.05.01
ab is a handy little utility for stress-testing.
it allows you to pound a url, and gives
some basic statistics at the end.
useful arguments are:
-c -- number of concurrent clients
-n -- number of total requests
-C -- a cookie string
-A -- Authen info eg 'user
assword'
Eg:
/usr/local/apache/bin/ab -c 8 -n 100 -A 'guest
ass*word' \
-C "User=id&4819; Pref=lang&en" \
"www.myhost.com/foobar.html"
Start with low values of c and n, as you could slow
your site down considerably; gradually increase
them for more rigorous stress-testing.
One potential issue is that ab doesn't tell
you the statuses of the requests, just the number
of failed requests. So, it will be hard to tell a
server error from a redirection, etc..