Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL® and Apache All in One

Load Testing with ApacheBench

You can test the scalability and performance of your site with benchmarking and traffic generation tools. There are many commercial and open-source tools available, each with varying degrees of sophistication. In general, it is very difficult to accurately simulate real-world request traffic because visitors have different navigation patterns, access the Internet using connections with different speeds, stop a download if it is taking too long, press the reload button repeatedly if they get impatient, and so on. As such, some tools record actual network traffic for later replay.

However, for a quick—but accurate—glimpse at basic information regarding your server's capability to handle heavy traffic, the Apache server ...