Web server benchmarking is a way of determining the performance of a web server with the aim of establishing how well it copes under a sufficiently high workload. Performance testing is important to help maintain continuous system performance.
The open source Linux benchmarking tools featured in this article enable the performance of a web server to be tested prior to releasing it in a production environment. Accurately testing a web server is quite a challenging activity. This is, in part, because a web system is a distributed system. Further, Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the application protocol for hypermedia information systems, can cause connection usage patterns that the Transmission Control Protocol was not designed for. Moreover, problems are generated in testing the performance because of the sheer dynamism of a web server.