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Heavy Load Testing ​

Introduction ​

Load testing is a good idea before any deployment. It’s nice to quickly establish a best-case scenario for a project before running more detailed tests down the road.

Apache Bench (ab) is a common tool for measuring the performance of HTTP servers in a Linux environment. t works by generating a flood of requests to a given URL and returns some easily digestible performance related metrics to the screen.

ab (and other similar tools) can help to answer the following questions:

  • Which implementation of action is faster?
  • What is my application’s average response time at a large number of simultaneous users or connections?
  • What is the maximum number of requests-per-second that my application can handle?
  • At what point will my application break?

Installation ​

On Debian-like linux:

bash
apt-get install apache2-utils

Testing ​

We used 1000 requests with a concurrency of 100:

bash
ab -n 1000 -c 100 http://localhost:8000/notifier/pixel

It will then generate output as follows:

text
Server Software:        nginx/1.13.3
Server Hostname:        localhost:8000
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /notifier/pixel
Document Length:        43 bytes

Concurrency Level:      100
Time taken for tests:   425.669 seconds
Complete requests:      1000
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      626044 bytes
HTML transferred:       43000 bytes
Requests per second:    2.35 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       42566.931 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       425.669 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          1.44 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   0.3      0       2
Processing:  1749 40616 7815.9  42238   49851
Waiting:     1749 40616 7815.9  42238   49850
Total:       1751 40616 7815.7  42238   49851

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%  42238
  66%  42689
  75%  43164
  80%  43687
  90%  45834
  95%  48327
  98%  48847
  99%  49164
 100%  49851 (longest request)

Note that result from your env will be different with results from develop or product servers.

Authentication ​

You can also use Apache Bench to benchmark a website where the authentication is based on session. All you need is to get a cookie value before the test.

bash
ab -n 40 -c 20 -C laravel_session=COOKIE_VALUE http://localhost:8000/admin

To pass basic HTTP authentication, you need to use -A attribute:

bash
ab -n 1000 -c 100 -A login:pass https://staging.ixdf.dev

Conclusion ​

Obviously, these results do not reflect realistic server performance. HTTP is just one piece of the puzzle. A slow templating engine and/or database will drag these numbers down significantly. Still, it gives you a quick ballpark figure for comparison.

Materials ​

7 Tips for Heavy Load Testing with Apache Bench