Apache ab Benchmark

# Install # macOS: brew install httpd (or already installed with Xcode tools) # Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install apache2-utils # CentOS/RHEL: sudo yum install httpd-tools # Basic GET benchmark ab -n 1000 -c 10 https://example.com/ # Flags: # -n total number of requests # -c concurrent requests (users) # -t time limit in seconds (instead of -n) # Simple examples ab -n 500 -c 5 http://localhost:3000/api/health ab -n 5000 -c 100 https://api.example.com/users ab -t 30 -c 50 http://localhost:8080/ # run for 30 seconds # HTTPS with SSL verification disabled ab -n 1000 -c 20 -k https://example.com/

# POST with JSON body # Create body file first: # echo '{"username":"test","password":"pass"}' > body.json ab -n 500 -c 10 \ -p body.json \ -T application/json \ http://localhost:3000/api/login # POST with form data # echo "username=test&password=pass" > form.txt ab -n 1000 -c 20 \ -p form.txt \ -T application/x-www-form-urlencoded \ http://localhost:3000/login # Custom headers ab -n 1000 -c 10 \ -H "Authorization: Bearer mytoken123" \ -H "Accept: application/json" \ -H "X-Custom-Header: value" \ http://localhost:3000/api/users # With cookies ab -n 500 -c 10 \ -C "sessionid=abc123; csrftoken=xyz" \ http://localhost:3000/dashboard

# Enable HTTP KeepAlive (persistent connections) ab -n 5000 -c 100 -k http://localhost:3000/ # HTTP/1.0 (default) ab -n 1000 -c 10 -0 http://localhost:3000/ # Timeout per request (seconds) ab -n 1000 -c 50 -s 30 http://localhost:3000/api/heavy # Disable non-2xx failures (count redirects as success) # Note: ab doesn't follow redirects by default # Verbose output ab -n 100 -c 5 -v 2 http://localhost:3000/ # SSL options ab -n 1000 -c 20 \ -z TLSv1.2 \ https://example.com/

# Export to gnuplot data file ab -n 5000 -c 50 -g results.tsv http://localhost:3000/ # Export HTML report ab -n 5000 -c 50 -w http://localhost:3000/ > report.html # Pipe to file ab -n 1000 -c 20 http://localhost:3000/ | tee ab-results.txt # Multiple runs (compare before/after) ab -n 2000 -c 20 http://localhost:3000/before > before.txt # (make changes) ab -n 2000 -c 20 http://localhost:3000/after > after.txt diff before.txt after.txt

Server Software: nginx/1.24.0 Server Hostname: localhost Server Port: 3000 Concurrency Level: 50 Time taken for tests: 12.345 seconds Complete requests: 5000 Failed requests: 0 ← 0 is ideal Non-2xx responses: 0 Requests per second: 405.04 [#/sec] ← throughput Time per request: 123.45 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent) Transfer rate: 312.50 [Kbytes/sec] Connection Times (ms): min mean[+/-sd] median max Connect: 0 1 0.5 1 5 Processing: 45 119 32.1 115 456 Waiting: 42 115 31.8 111 452 Total: 45 120 32.3 116 460 Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms) 50% 116 ← median (P50) 66% 128 75% 138 80% 143 90% 162 ← P90 95% 180 ← P95 98% 200 99% 215 ← P99 100% 460 ← slowest request (max)