Wednesday, October 16, 2013

AB tool

Performance Testing your Web Server

To benchmark the performance of your web server applications we recommend the Apache "ab" tool.  The ab tool will show how many requests per second your Apache installation is capable of serving.  The ab tool is a part of the Apache httpd package in CentOS and Red Hat distributions and the "apache2-utils" package in Debian.
Below is the basic ab command and its output.  The -c parameter specifies the number of connections; the -k stands for HTTP Keep-Alive; and the -tparameter sets the time in seconds for which each connection is alive.  The application is then hammered through those connections.
# ab -kc 20 -t 60 http://8.19.73.87/index.html

Benchmarking 8.19.73.87 (be patient)
Finished 130 requests


Server Software:        Apache/2.2.3
Server Hostname:        8.19.73.87
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /index.html
Document Length:        283 bytes

Concurrency Level:      20
Time taken for tests:   62.269650 seconds
Complete requests:      130
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Non-2xx responses:      130
Keep-Alive requests:    0
Total transferred:      60060 bytes
HTML transferred:       36790 bytes
Requests per second:    2.09 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       9579.946 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       478.997 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          0.93 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:      206  392 637.2    250    3325
Processing:  4523 8222 3030.7   8016   13982
Waiting:      208 4798 2958.5   4212   10838
Total:       4813 8614 3120.1   8329   14269

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%   8329
  66%  10851
  75%  10998
  80%  11128
  90%  13933
  95%  14056
  98%  14189
  99%  14223
 100%  14269 (longest request)
  • To perform a "flood" test we set the number of requests (-n) to, say, 5000, and assign the number of concurrent connections{{ (-c}}) to something like 200:
    # ab -n 5000 -c 200 http://8.19.73.87/index.html
    
    Benchmarking 8.19.73.87 (be patient)
    Finished 316 requests
    
    
    Server Software:        Apache/2.2.3
    Server Hostname:        8.19.73.87
    Server Port:            80
    
    Document Path:          /index.html
    Document Length:        283 bytes
    
    Concurrency Level:      1
    Time taken for tests:   203.610963 seconds
    Complete requests:      316
    Failed requests:        0
    Write errors:           0
    Non-2xx responses:      316
    Total transferred:      145992 bytes
    HTML transferred:       89428 bytes
    Requests per second:    1.55 [#/sec] (mean)
    Time per request:       644.338 [ms] (mean)
    Time per request:       644.338 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
    Transfer rate:          0.70 [Kbytes/sec] received
    
    Connection Times (ms)
                  min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
    Connect:      206  340 509.5    250    3324
    Processing:   207  302 450.1    250    7830
    Waiting:      206  285 201.5    250    2693
    Total:        414  643 683.4    501    8081
    
    Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
      50%    501
      66%    505
      75%    579
      80%    645
      90%    651
      95%   1313
      98%   3648
      99%   3649
     100%   8081 (longest request)
    
  • If the ab output makes you suspect issues, it is useful to look into any replies using tcpdump.  In particular, tcp-rst replies could appear.  To catch them, use:
    # tcpdump -nn 'tcp[tcpflags] == tcp-rst' and port 80
    
    tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode
    listening on eth0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 96 bytes
    10:59:06.036411 IP 89.253.250.50.53261 > 8.19.73.87.80: R 179261015:179261015(0) win 0
    10:59:06.036521 IP 89.253.250.50.53261 > 8.19.73.87.80: R 179261015:179261015(0) win 0
    10:59:06.036553 IP 89.253.250.50.53261 > 8.19.73.87.80: R 179261016:179261016(0) win 0
    
  • We are interested mostly in tcp-rst server replies, as they point to misconfiguration or performance issues.  To catch server-side tcp-rst replies use:
    # tcpdump -nn 'tcp[tcpflags] == tcp-rst' and port 80 and src host 89.253.250.50
    
    where 89.253.250.50 is the server hosting your tests.

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