Test the Web Server Response Time with Flood (1)

When you set the server to be put into use, you are most concerned about the performance of the server. You can use some manual methods for testing, but manual methods have many limitations.

Regardless of the time and energy invested by the manual testing method, the major disadvantage of manual testing is that it does not easily reveal the real problems of your site, is it a problem with server settings, or is it caused by some dynamic components or network infrastructure?

Fortunately, the Apache HTTP project contains a sub-project named HTTPD-Test. as revealed by this name, this is an Apache Universal Test toolkit, which contains a large number of different tools, this article will mainly introduce a tool named Flood, which is named so because it uses a Flood of requests to the server to test the server's response time.

Flood uses an XML file to perform necessary test settings, including the URL and POST data used in the test and the server group for testing preparation. Then Flood starts to measure the time for the following system operations:

● Open a socket to the server
● Write requests to the server to the socket
● Read Server Response
● Disable socket

When the test is complete, the administrator can check whether there are configuration problems with the Apache server or other HTTP servers, the actual server load, the performance of the hardware, and whether there are bottlenecks in the basic network settings.

Install Flood

You can download the httpd-test and apr/apr-util software packages from the Apache website. The latter is required to build directly from the Apache CVS server. You must first set the logon password to "anoncvs ")

$ Cvs-d: pserver: anoncvs@cvs.apache.org:/home/cvspublic login
$ Cvs-d: pserver: anoncvs@cvs.apache.org:/home/cvspublic co httpd-test/flood
$ Cd httpd-test/flood
$ Cvs-d: pserver: anoncvs@cvs.apache.org:/home/cvspublic co apr
$ Cvs-d: pserver: anoncvs@cvs.apache.org:/home/cvspublic co apr-util

If you have obtained the source code, you can install it using the following command:

$ Buildconf
$ Configure
$ Make all

Now the installation is complete.