Why Apache Benchmark Is Not Enough

You are working for months on a new web application or e-commerce system and usually a few weeks or just days before the launch a complete enough feature set is running on a production-like system so that you can run a realistic load-test. Hopefully providing you with accurate picture of the performance of your future system.

To safe time and effort, you probably opt for the simple solution and use the wide-spread Apache Benchmark (ab) or siege commandline tools to setup a load-test. Both allow you to generate load on a given URL and collect performance metrics. Siege even allows you to provide a list of URLs and login if necessary with a little more effort. The results from both tools are simple numbers that are easy to communicate: users / second and average, min, max response time.

We often advise to resist the temptation of simple tools and numbers, because they are suited for benchmarking and you cannot trust the results of ab or siege to be realistic real-world load-simulation of your system.

There are a number of reasons for this:

Are there reasons to use ab or siege? Yes. When you develop locally on a specific page and try to optimize it using a benchmark. You can quickly get a relative comparison of the performance before and after a change under similar traffic conditions.

In addition to a UI, where you can click together complex use-cases and scenarios using different load-generating strategies, jMeter is also fully programmable to every possible use-case. It does take time to learn jMeter, but as a result you are much more flexible to run different detailed scenarios and get detailed data from every single request that you can analyze.

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