I'm trying to get an accurate request/per second of my apache for different pages and for different server options. I am using both ab and siege against apache to try to find out how many users can be loading a specific page at a time.
I find that if when concurrent connections are set to anything above 50-100, the server will run fine for 5-10 seconds but then completely stops accepting new connections after that. All connections from ab and siege returns "connection time out". The higher I set the concurrent users, the faster this happens. If I set it to 1000, it happens almost immediately. It is as if the server has ran out on something. But I am not sure what, ran out of sockets? Cpu usageis showing as 2% and plenty of memory. Also this is done over LAN so the network is not the limiting factor.
Surely apache must be able to handle over 100 simultaneous connections at the same time? My application will probably have more than 100 users making request at the same time.
Any ideas? What command should I be using with ab/siege to properly probe the maximum request/second?
PS. so far I am only benching the default page (ie. welcome to apache...)