Tag Archive for 'Benchmark'

APC – Alternative PHP Cache

A PHP-accelerator is a PHP extension designed to improve the performance of software applications written in the PHP language.

Most PHP accelerators work by caching the compiled p-code (portable code) of PHP-Scripts to avoid the overhead of reparsing and recompiling source code on each request made for example by a stupid bot.

APC is free, open source framework that optimizes PHP intermediate code and caches data and compiled code from the PHP bytecode compiler in shared memory. APC is quickly becoming the de-facto standard PHP caching mechanism as it will be included built-in to the core of PHP starting with PHP 6 < - Great news! Continue reading ‘APC – Alternative PHP Cache’

Webserver Benchmark

ab (Apache Benchmark) is a tool for benchmarking your HTTP server. It provides a quick an easy way to evaluate your http serving capabilities. ab overloads the server with http requests and measures the time it takes to serve all those requests.

How to install ab and where to get it? The real thing is that ab comes preconfigured with your apache installation. Apache by himself is just an extension command for the Apache Web Server. So if you have already installed Apache, then you should be able to run ab.

What we need in order to get ab to work is type the command and append the URL address we want to test. The command is issued as follows.

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server ~ # ab -n10000 -c8 http://piper/
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# Number of connections to send to the server
-n
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# Number concurrent requests to be made
-c
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# Option activates the KeepAlive feature
-k
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# Is the timelimit (in seconds)
-t

ab testing mechanism actually is a good example of a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.