Apache Bench - Comparison of Outputs
In this chapter, we will compare the outputs with and without flags. Let us see how the use of appropriate flags can increase the performance of your web application. Before that, we need to understand how if your application is simple then you may not notice the difference. As is the case with our simple application, with flags and without flags. Then we will perform the same test with https://www.apache.org/ URL, and see the difference.
Testing our Application without Flags
In this section, we will understand how to test our application without flags.
$ ab -n 100 -c 10 http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Output
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1604373 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking 127.0.0.1 (be patient).....done
Server Software: Rocket
Server Hostname: 127.0.0.1
Server Port: 8000
Document Path: /
Document Length: Variable
Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests: 0.244 seconds
Complete requests: 100
Failed requests: 0
Non-2xx responses: 100
Keep-Alive requests: 0
Total transferred: 27700 bytes
HTML transferred: 6600 bytes
Requests per second: 2208.77 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 4.527 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.453 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 597.49 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 1 2 0.7 2 3
Processing: 0 2 0.7 2 4
Waiting: 0 2 1.0 2 3
Total: 4 4 0.3 4 5
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 4
66% 4
75% 5
80% 5
90% 5
95% 5
98% 5
99% 5
100% 5 (longest request)
Testing our Application with Flags
In this section, we will understand how to test our application with flags.
$ ab -l -r -n 100 -c 10 -k -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate" http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Output
...
Requests per second: 2277.07 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 4.392 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.439 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 615.97 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 1 2 0.7 2 3
Processing: 0 2 0.7 2 4
Waiting: 0 2 1.0 2 3
Total: 4 4 0.2 4 5
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 4
66% 4
75% 4
80% 4
90% 5
95% 5
98% 5
99% 5
100% 5 (longest request)
We can simply note that there is not much difference between the output statistics.
Testing Apache Organisation Website without Flags
Let us now see how to test the Apache Organisation Website without flags.
$ ab -n 100 -c 10 http://www.apache.org/
Output
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1604373 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking www.apache.org (be patient).....done
Server Software: Apache/2.4.7
Server Hostname: www.apache.org
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /
Document Length: 58433 bytes
Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests: 1.498 seconds
Complete requests: 100
Failed requests: 0
Total transferred: 5877500 bytes
HTML transferred: 5843300 bytes
Requests per second: 66.74 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 149.840 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 14.984 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 3830.58 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 12 110 295.2 12 1012
Processing: 37 38 0.5 38 39
Waiting: 12 13 0.3 13 15
Total: 49 147 295.4 50 1051
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 50
66% 50
75% 50
80% 50
90% 816
95% 1050
98% 1051
99% 1051
100% 1051 (longest request)
Testing Apache Organisation Website with Flags
Let us now test the Apache Organisation Website with Flags.
$ ab -l -r -n 100 -c 10 -k -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate" http://www.apache.org/
Output
...
Document Length: Variable
Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests: 0.357 seconds
Complete requests: 100
Failed requests: 0
Keep-Alive requests: 100
Total transferred: 1358510 bytes
HTML transferred: 1317700 bytes
Requests per second: 280.28 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 35.678 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 3.568 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 3718.41 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 1 3.7 0 12
Processing: 14 17 21.3 15 227
Waiting: 14 17 21.3 14 227
Total: 14 18 21.5 15 227
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 15
66% 15
75% 15
80% 15
90% 27
95% 28
98% 29
99% 227
100% 227 (longest request)
You can simply note how the request per second increased with the use of flags. In the instant case, it is particularly due to use of -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate because this flag tells the Apache server to serve requests in gzipped format.
Considering the Apache Bench Results
A few important points need to be considered when it comes to the Apache Bench results. This will help us design our overall strategy to remove the bottlenecks in our application and improve its performance.
We need to Requests Per Second. This gives us an idea of how well our web server set-up is working; the larger the number, the better the performance. Then comes the Connection Times (ms) and the Percentage of the requests served. You may have to tweak the settings of your web server to change these metrics to your desired performance.
Check if there are errors in the Apache’s or the used web server error logs or (general) logs. As you will increase your load, things will start to choke: memory issues will start coming up. A lot of python scripts will begin to crash if they are not written with concurrency in mind.
You need to find out what is the critical concurrency value above which your web server crashes and/or times-out? Normally this should happen at a fairly high concurrency level. If this value is low, something is wrong and you need to adjust these settings lower/higher.
Conclusion
In this tutorial we learned how Apache Bench can be used to load test any web site or web application. Apache Bench can be a very valuable tool for determining how your web application server setup should be improved, to reduce bottlenecks and increase performance. Now that you are familiar with the basic usage of Apache Bench, you can start by creating new test plans to measure the performance of your applications in various scenarios.
