How i came across this Apache Bench aka AB tool ?

When i need to load test to check the rate limiting in my previous blog on Gatekeeper Cloud Pattern, i was searching a new tool to load test. Usually i prefer Locust, but this time i wanted to search new tool. That’s how i came across ab .

Apache Bench

Apache Bench (ab) is a simple and powerful command-line tool for performance testing web servers. It helps developers measure the performance of HTTP services by simulating multiple requests and analyzing the results.

In this blog, we’ll cover everything you need to get started, with examples for various use cases which i tried.

0. Output

Server Software:        Werkzeug/3.1.3
Server Hostname:        localhost
Server Port:            8090

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        16 bytes

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   2.050 seconds
Complete requests:      2000
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      378000 bytes
HTML transferred:       32000 bytes
Requests per second:    975.61 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       10.250 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       1.025 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          180.07 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   0.0      0       1
Processing:     2   10   2.3     10      37
Waiting:        2   10   2.2     10      37
Total:          3   10   2.3     10      37

It gives a detailed output on time taken, data transferred and other stress details.

1. Basic Load Testing

To send 100 requests to a server with 10 concurrent connections

ab -n 100 -c 10 http://example.com/

• -n 100 : Total 100 requests.
• -c 10 : Concurrent 10 requests at a time.
• http://example.com/: The URL to test.

2. Testing with POST Requests

For testing POST requests, we can use the -p option to specify the data file and -T to set the content type.

ab -n 50 -c 5 -p post_data.txt -T "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" http://example.com/api

• -p post_data.txt – File containing POST data.
• -T "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" – Content type of the request.

3. Testing with Custom Headers

To add custom headers to your request

ab -n 100 -c 20 -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" http://example.com/api

• -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" – Adds an Authorization header.

4. Benchmarking with Keep-Alive

By default, ab closes the connection after each request. Use -k to enable keep-alive

ab -n 500 -c 50 -k http://example.com/

• -k Enables HTTP Keep-Alive.

5. Outputting Detailed Results

To write the results to a file for analysis

ab -n 200 -c 20 http://example.com/ > results.txt

• > results.txt – Saves the results in a text file.

6. Configuring Timeout Values

To set a custom timeout,

ab -n 100 -c 10 -s 60 http://example.com/

• -s 60: Sets a 60-second timeout for each request.

Apache Bench outputs key metrics such as

• Requests per second: Average number of requests handled.
• Time per request: Average time per request.
• Transfer rate: Data transfer rate.

Popular open stack for web development – LAMP. Click Here to read documentation.

Apache installation

sudo apt update -y

sudo apt install apache2 apache2-utils -y

sudo systemctl start apache2

sudo systemctl enable apache2

sudo systemctl status apache2

sudo apache2 -v

Providing access to Apache user (Default user) for document root

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html

Installing MariaDB

sudo apt install mariadb-server mariadb-client

sudo systemctl start mariadb

sudo systemctl enable mariadb

sudo systemctl status mariadb

creating root password for mariadb

mysql_secure_installation
Enter current password for root (enter for none): enter
Set root password? [Y/n] Y
New password:* Re-enter new password:*
Remove anonymous users? [Y/n]Y
Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n]Y
Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n]Y
Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n]Y

login to mariadb

mariadb -u root -p

PHP installation

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php

sudo apt update
sudo apt install php8.2 libapache2-mod-php8.2 php8.2-mysql php-common php8.2-cli php8.2-common php8.2-opcache php8.2-readline php-json

Enable the Apache php8.2 module

a2enmod php8.2

Check the version

php –version

Restart the apache server

sudo systemctl restart apache2

Test with php test page

Create a test page

sudo vim /var/www/html/info.php
<?php phpinfo(); ?>
:wq! save and exit

http://localhost/info.php or http://127.0.0.1/info.php

Today we have seen step by step instructions to install apache2 webserver on our linux machines.

• apache2
• nginx
• IIS
• httpd

These are some common webserver applications being widely used around the world. In this sessio, we have seen how to install apache2 on debian based OS machine.

apache2 is a webserver daemon application(kind of background processes that start at system boot and continue running until the system is shut down)

sudo apt install apache2 -y

Above command install apache2 on our machine. The argument -y is added in the same command to pass it when the terminal prompts for an answer.

After installation, if incase the system is restarted, by default the apache2 service would be in ‘disabled’ state. So, in order to keep it active always at any time although if restart occurs, we need to use below command.

sudo systemctl enable apache2

sudo systemctl status apache2

This command is used to check if apache2 webserver’s status or to check if it is installed.

To check in which port the apache2 webserver is running, use command as below

It shows the application is running in port 80

By default – post apache2 installation, if we try “localhost” in browser, it will display index page of apache2 that is present in /var/www/index.html

We have seen how to edit that html through vim and how to keep custom html page.

Post editing html – when we invoke “localhost” the updated html page is visible in browser. Moreover, the same html content can be seen in the terminal through below command

We have also seen how to install such application in WAN. Dhanasekar showed how to procure a cloud machine from linode akamai website. I will try the same after some time.

We have see how to transfer a file from localmachine to remote machine using scp command. As per below screenshot – the index.html file from local machine has been transferred to remote machine to display the home page when apache2 server runs in remote machine.

Below commands can be used to start/stop the webserver

systemctl start apache2
systemctl stop apache2
systemctl restart apache2

Here,we are going to discuss about how to install apache server in debian.

sudo apt update

sudo apt install apache2

Once,the packages are installed in your system.Run the server by the following command.

sudo systemctl start apache2

Now you can check the status whether it is running or not by using..,

sudo systemctl status apache2

Active: active (running) since Thu 2024-02-08 18:37:49 IST; 11s ago
You can check that it is running.Also there is a another method to check by entering http://localhost/ in any of your browser.

sudo systemctl enable apache2

If you don’t want to start every time and by default the server should be on running,use the above command.It starts automatically when the system boots.

sudo systemctl stop apache2

This command will stop the server.

sudo systemctl disable apache2

This will disable the server and is not running after the system boots.

Now,we can see how to remove apache server.

sudo apt remove --purge apache2

This will remove the apache2 server from your system.

sudo apt autoremove

This command is used to remove the apache related dependencies automatically from the system.

That’s it…