Apache Bench is a useful little tool for testing the response time of a webservice, and thus the performance of the webserver. We can specify the number of requests to send, the target URL, set up concurrency, just to name a few of this tool’s settings.
While such simulated workloads will not result exactly the same data that real world traffic will do, it is always a good idea to test before going to production. Maybe before deploying a new version of the application, we could run the tests on the new version, and compare the results with the previous test data to see if our application will serve slower, or faster than the last version. With well-planned testing, this tool can show the possible bottlenecks of the application, and may provide points of interest where we should look into our code for possible optimization.
In this tutorial we will install Apache Bench on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, as well as an Apache Webserver to run some tests against.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- How to install Apache Bench
- How to install httpd webserver, and add some basic content
- How to run simple tests against the webserver