[tlug] Re: [RFC] Outline of the fast HTTP talk

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2008-11-03 11:16 +0000 (Mon), John Fremlin wrote:

> The benchmark consists of running apachebench with concurrency 100
> against a page that should return an HTTP body of "<h1>Hello $name</h1>". The
> "name" parameter is given as part of the GET request, and should be
> correctly escaped (if it contains < characters, etc.).
> 
> The objective of the test is to show how fast a very simple dynamic page
> can be, without worrying about databases.

That sounds like an excellent simple benchmark for that sort of thing.

Can I just send you a tar file of a qam project that you can unpack?
Ruby 1.8.whatever will be required, but you're already set up for that.
Do you want me to include lighttpd source, or are you ok with installing
your lighttpd 1.4.18 or 1.4.19 package from your package system?

As well: we gave up on ab quite a while ago, and use httperf[1] for
benchmarking. We've just started extracting a generic test project for
load testing websites; I'll see if I can put together something to try
with this.

Httperf does have one unfortunate, and fairly major, issue: it uses
select(). Given that it's oriented around the idea of maintaining a
certain number of requests per second, regardless of how long it takes
to receive a response, this usually results in it running out of file
descriptors long before it's generated the kind of load a modern machine
is capable of generating.

It really needs to be using kqueue, but of course my issue here is that
I have a large pile of NetBSD boxen, but (almost) all my clients have
Linux boxen, which support only epoll. Perhaps for this app I could hack
in some #ifdefs that would do the job, or maybe I just fall back to
poll() and live with the performance hit. Who knows. But anything has
to be better than select(), so if anybody's interested in working on
this....

[1] http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/linux/httperf/

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974   
Mobile sites and software consulting: http://www.starling-software.com