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Comment by tyilo | Hacker News Reader

What is ab?

Don't use it for actual benchmarking though, it has lots of known problems. Use something like: https://github.com/wg/wrk

What sort of issues does ab have?

Well the best thing would be to try it yourself. I have found:

   * ab has more results variation between runs
   * ab will almost always report lower performance than wrk
   * If you have two implementations being benchmarked, A and B and B is always faster than A. wrk will report a greater degree of performance separation between A and B.

These results are less noticeable the lower performance the site being benchmarked is.

ab takes more CPU time than a decent web server too.

wrk looks interesting. Have used http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/

How does it compare to Siege?

Thanks for sharing!

apache bench

It lets you simulate hitting your web server to benchmark the speed. You can do cool things like test concurrent and sequential connections.

The difference between benchmarking and DoS is intent. It could be taken the wrong way and now it's a felony.

"Three Felonies a Day" via https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2013-J...

I didn't know either. Per "man ab":

> ab - Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool

Without having to open the man page:

    $ whatis ab
    ab (1)               - Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool

Or with bsd-games installed:

    $ wtf ab
    ab: ab (1)               - Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool

Is there a similar tool to see what a certain option in a command does, without opening the man page?

If you just type the command in you should see a list of options and what they do.

Probably best not to try this on any systems you care about if the command is completely unknown. killall on Solaris might have some unintended consequences.

You probably know, but try -h or --help behind the command.

apache bench

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