Ab / ApacheBench is a tool commonly used to perform benchmark by many people. unfortunately, the results are displayed somewhat difficult to read by most people. but it can be tricked by turning it into a plot image. this time, I will make examples how to change the results of apachebench into a form of image plots using gnuplot. although apachebench’s report is very helpful, we need to output the data in a parse-able format. To do this we use the -g switch which will output a gnuplot-friendly tab delimited table of data.
First we need to installed gnuplot if we don’t have it yet.
$sudo yum -y install gnuplot
In this example i’ll benchmark request on static png file.
Run first webserver benchmark
$ ab -k -n 50000 -c 100 -g server1.txt http://server1/server1.png
Run second webserver benchmark
$ ab -k -n 50000 -c 100 -g server2.txt http://server2/server2.png
Example result server1.txt/server2.txt
starttime seconds ctime dtime ttime wait Tue May 10 16:42:28 2011 1305020548 0 2 2 2 Tue May 10 16:42:28 2011 1305020548 0 2 2 2 Tue May 10 16:42:28 2011 1305020548 0 3 3 2 Tue May 10 16:42:28 2011 1305020548 0 3 3 3 Tue May 10 16:42:28 2011 1305020548 0 3 3 3 Tue May 10 16:42:28 2011 1305020548 0 3 3 3 Tue May 10 16:42:28 2011 1305020548 0 3 3 3 Tue May 10 16:42:28 2011 1305020548 0 3 3 3