Benchmarking Your Site with ‘http_load’
http_load is a stunningly useful HTTP benchmarking utility that gives you a rough idea of how many hits per second a server is capable of serving. You simply tell it what pages to grab, and how many “clients” it should run in parallel; it gives you back useful information about the average fetches per second and the average, minimum, and maximum response times. It’s no substitute for a solid profiler to dig into the hows and whys of your application’s performance, but it’s great at telling you when you’re “good enough” to launch.
Installing http_load on OS X
- Download from http://www.acme.com/software/http_load/
- Open terminal, cd to the directory where the archive is and unzip
$ tar xvzf http_load-12mar2006.tar.gz - Move to that directory
$ cd http_load-12mar2006 - Run
$ make - Run
$ sudo make install