ezab

This is a tool for benchmarking web servers. It is designed to give you an impression of how your current web server installation performs. This especially shows you how many requests per second your web server installation is capable of serving.

It strives to be as close to Apache Bench as possible, both in supported options and in output format.

Requirements

• php version 5
• ability to run php from the command line (for linux this often means installing the php-cli package)
• the curl php extension

Using the tool

This tool can be used in 3 ways:

1. from the command line, eg: "php ezab.php -h"
2. as a web page (when hosted by a webserver), eg: http://localhost/ezab.php
3. as a library included by other php applications

Synopsis, options

Just run the script using the -h option:

• php ezab.php -h
• http://localhost/ezab.php?h=1

The goal is to be 100% compatible with the syntax used by AB.

Output

See the AB docs for details. At the time of writing, the most recent version is available at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/programs/ab.html

Development status

Current status is UNDER CONSTRUCTION.

Many features of the original AB are still missing, such s POST/PUT support, custom http headers, cookies etc... The output of the tool is also quite lacking. Instead of having the list of things that do work in the docs, it is suggested to run the script with the -h option.

On the other hand, there are already a couple of fetaures that we do better than the original:

1. support for http 1.1 by default. AB uses http 1.0, but most of the web in 2012 runs on version 1.1. This means that the numbers you get should be closer to "real life traffic"
2. better support for keepalives (AB can only do http/1.0 keepalives, which Apache does not support when running dynamic page generators such as php)
3. support for compressed http responses (using the -j option)

Under the hood

Whatever way you choose to run the program, what happens is that the php script will execute more copies of itself, each of which will send some requests to the server. The number of processes forked depends on the "-c" parameter. The main process waits for all chidren to terminate execution, collects their metrics, aggregates them and displays the result. To debug execution of the program if anything goes wrong, run it at verbosity level 9 (option: -v9)