palb 0.0.1

Python Apache-Like Benchmark Tool

Author:

Oliver Tonnhofer <[e-mail]>

Introduction

palb is a HTTP benchmark tool. The command line interface resembles the Apache benchmark tool ab. It lacks the advanced features of ab, but it supports multiple URLs (from arguments, files, stdin, and Python code).

Installation

This package can either be installed from a .egg file using setuptools, or from the tarball using the standard Python distutils.

If you are installing from a tarball, run the following command as an administrative user:

python setup.py install

If you are installing using setuptools, you don’t even need to download anything as the latest version will be downloaded for you from the Python package index:

easy_install --upgrade palb

If you already have the .egg file, you can use that too:

easy_install palb-0.0.1-py2.5.egg

Example & Usage

Simple usage (1 request):

% palb http://example.com/

Muliple requests (2 concurrent, 10 total requests):

% palb -c 2 -n 10 http://example.com/

Alternate between multiple URLs:

% palb -c 2 -n 100 http://example.com/index.html\
  http://example.com/foo.html http://example.com/bar.html

Get URLs from file (use - as file name to read from stdin):

% cat test.txt
http://example.com/one.html
http://example.com/two.html
% palb -n 20 -f test.txt

Get URLs from python code:

% cat test.py
def urls(args):
    while True:
        yield 'http://example.com/'
% palb -n 100 -u test:urls

args is a list with all remaining arguments. Use it to pass options to your own URL generators.

Here is an example output:

% palb -c 4 -n 100 -u rndtest:random_urls 'http://localhost:5050/bar/'
This is palb, Version 0.0.1
Copyright (c) 2009 Oliver Tonnhofer <[e-mail]>
Licensed under MIT License

Benchmarking (be patient)..... done


Average Document Length: 21835 bytes

Concurrency Level:    4
Time taken for tests: 0.685 seconds
Complete requests:    100
Failed requests:      0
Total transferred:    2183463 bytes
Requests per second:  145.92 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:     27.065 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:     6.766 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:        3111.37 [Kbytes/sec] received

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%     12
  66%     40
  75%     47
  80%     53
  90%     74
  95%     90
  98%    111
  99%    114
 100%    114 (longest request)

Performance Notes

palb is able to handle dozens of concurrent requests and a few hundred requests per second (depending on your hardware). If you are expecting lots of requests, check against ab if palb is not the bottleneck. But then you are maybe not testing dynamic content, don’t need the python URL generator feature and can use ab directly.