What's the best way to stress test the performance of a nginx website?

Server NGINX
1

I haven’t done stress testing in a long time… so I’m not sure what the
best tools are, specifically for our nginx site

thanks

2

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 5:06 PM, Ilan B.[email protected] wrote:

I haven’t done stress testing in a long time… so I’m not sure what the
best tools are, specifically for our nginx site

Rarely will nginx itself be the bottleneck. For example:

ab testing serving a single image will probably show anywhere from
10,000 - 20,000 req/s, that is because is because after the first
access, it will be in ram and can be served fast and efficiently from
there on. However in a real production environment, where you might be
serving thousands of different files - when the os file cache (in
ram) fills up, those 10,000req/s will become about 300req/s, and in a
worst case scenario (where every request is an os cache miss), it
becomes entirely disk seek bound (which is why SSD hard disk are great
for this sort of job).

3

It depends on what you really want to do.

If it’s just stressing nginx with a unique request, ab should be the
best option. And I think this is what you’re looking for.

If you want to make some kind of more complex benchmarking, there is
many tools (free and commercial) for that.

I’ve tested :

  • the free jmeter which is good to stress a webserver with differents
    scenarios. The results are good if you keep them simple. Don’t except
    to make a huge bench with complex results easily.
  • the commercial qaload which is very expensive and very complex but
    very powerfull. You need to practice to get rid of it
  • the commercial neoload which is powerfull and very simple. The
    reports made after are amazing. I’m using it for 4 months and I’m very
    happy with it.

But benchmarking isn’t just easy.

2009/6/27 meto [email protected]:

4

Just to clarify, I’m not specifically looking for how Nginx performs,
but
rather how our site performs, being that its a dynamic, php site and
relatively quiet during the summer time (i.e. a good time to test) so
I’m
looking for a tool recommendation to simulate load as well as how to
best
process that information.

Thank you for the advise, I’ll take a look at some of the tool
recommendations.

5

Another free tool of note is siege (it can mimic users’ requests,
follow links, etc, and is based on httperf, I guess)

2009/6/26 Micha³ Jaszczyk [email protected]:

6

It is not exactly an Nginx question then :slight_smile:

Something cheap-ish and simple-ish is to create your own scripts to hit
your
sites in a way that you know will or will not trigger cache hits and
expensive queries.

Chuck in some Apache Bench hits and judge the timings yourself…

2009/6/28 Ilan B. [email protected]