On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 4:29 PM, Jarrod Slick <jarrod@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I'm curious -- why do you think that the results will be inconsistent? If > anything I would be inclined to think that using localhost would improve > consistency as extraneous variables like network congestion at the time of > testing would not be present. > There is no way you can fully load a webserver using a single instance of a testing tool running on the same box. For starters, the testing tool will end up consuming more CPU than the webserver, invalidating your test results. For a followup point, I would think that you would need multiple instances of the testing tool, running on multiple boxes, to fully load a server. Certainly, you would need multiple instances of ab (which is what LiteSpeed used to do their tests), as ab is not particularly good. A better tool is Apache flood, or siege, either of which will stress the server much harder than ab. Network congestion/latencies could also affect the test result, which is why you would run these tests multiple times, using a dedicated switch (ie not connected to anything else). Cheers Tom --------------------------------------------------------------------- The official User-To-User support forum of the Apache HTTP Server Project. See <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/userslist.html> for more info. To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx " from the digest: users-digest-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx