Linux Journal: Stress Testing an Apache Application Server in a Real World Environment

“We’ve all had an experience in which the software is installed
on the servers, the network is connected and the application is
running. Naturally, the next step is to think, ‘I wonder how much
traffic this system can support?’ Sometimes the question lingers
and sometimes it passes, but it always presents itself. So, how do
we figure out how much traffic our server and application can
handle? Can it handle only a few active clients or can it withstand
a proper Slashdotting? To appreciate fully the challenges one faces
in trying to answer these questions, we must first understand the
dynamic application and how it works.

“A traditional dynamic application has five main components: the
application server, the database server, the application, the
database and the network. In the open-source world, the application
server usually is Apache. And, often, Apache is running on
Linux.

“The database server can be almost anything that can do the job;
for most smaller applications, this tends to be MySQL. In this
article, I highlight the open-source PostgreSQL server, which also
runs on Linux…”

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