Benchmarking and stress test tools

I had funs with two benchmarking tools. They are "ab" which stands for Apache Benchmarking tool and siege. Both can be used to stress test a web server.

#ab -k -n 1000 -c 100 http://www.example.com/123.html

The above states that 100 threads are concurrently open and each makes 1000 requests. "-k" means to perform multiple requests within one HTTP session

#siege -b -r 1000 -c 100 http://www.example.com/123.html

This one operates similarly and siege is run in background mode.

Just a note to remind myself that when doing stress test on a web server, it is better to know the maximum concurrent threads the server is configured.