Natural WordPress benchmarking

    

I am planning on benchmarking various OS and HTTP daemons to host my WordPress site. A well-known (free) tool to benchmark Web servers is ApacheBench. But it can only use a single URL for each benchmark session.

A trick to achieve natural benchmarking on WordPress, or “simulate real users browsing as much as possible”, is to use a random generated content ; using the ?orderby=rand parameter. This will allow the Web server to be used as if several users were doing real things ; that is, reading various content:

# ab -n 20 -c 5 "http://www.tumfatig.net/?orderby=rand"
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>
(...)
Concurrency Level:      5
Time taken for tests:   31.190 seconds
Complete requests:      20
(...)
Requests per second:    0.64 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       7797.489 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       1559.498 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
(...)