On: Show HN: This page will disappear in 10,000 views

[tyilo]

What is ab?

[voidlogic → tyilo]

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

[azth → voidlogic]

What sort of issues does ab have?

[voidlogic → azth]

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.

[justincormack → voidlogic]

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

[ballard → voidlogic]

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

[troels → voidlogic]

How does it compare to Siege?

[pallandt → voidlogic]

Thanks for sharing!

[ballard → tyilo]

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...

[joeblau → tyilo]

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.

[jweese → tyilo]

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

> ab - Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool

[lucb1e → jweese]

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

[thameera → lucb1e]

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

[joshferg → thameera]

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

[mryan → joshferg]

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.

[lucb1e → thameera]

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

[rdouble → tyilo]

apache bench