Load Testing Blog
The Fastest Webserver?
Looking for the snappiest, fastest web server software available on this here internet? So were we. Valid, independent, non-synthetic benchmarks can be difficult to find. Of course, we all know that benchmarks don’t tell us everything we need to know about real-world performance; but what’s the fun of having choices if we can’t pick the best?
Exactly. I decided to do a little research project of my own.
Test Plan
I selected for this exercise recent (as of October 2011) versions of Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd, G-WAN, and IIS — a list that includes the most popular … Continue reading »
Load Testing Back to Basics: Avoiding the KeepAliveTimeout Race Condition
You’ve recorded your test case, configured your datasets, and run your replays. You start up the load test and … you see numerous errors like this:
“The connection with the server was unexpectedly closed before starting the response.”
What’s going on? Well, one common reason for this error is a connection-related race condition between Load Tester and the web server due to the server’s configured persistent connection timeout.
Persistent connections are an HTTP mechanism for minimizing network connection overhead between the browser and the web server. If the client … Continue reading »
Load Testing with IE 8.0, Firefox 3.5
The performance improvements in the latest browsers (Internet Explorer 8.0 and Firefox 3.5) have been eagerly awaited for many months…though they come at a price.
Measuring the Performance Effects of mod_deflate in Apache 2.2
Enabling mod_deflate can reduce the bandwidth usage on a particular file by up to 70%, but also reduces the maximum load a server can handle and may actually reduce site performance if the site compresses large dynamic files. Read the full report for a complete analysis.
Open Source PHP Accelerator Increases Performance 2.8 Times
The latest installment in our PHP performance series takes a look at the open source APC module, which is described this way: “APC is a free, open, and robust framework for caching and optimizing PHP intermediate code.” The results were dramatic, as the module increased the user capacity of the reference PHP application by 2.8 times.
