menavaur / Autobench

Autobench - an HTTP benchmarking suite

Copyright (C) 2001-2003 Julian T. J. Midgley [email protected]

Homepage: http://www.xenoclast.org/autobench/

Licence

Autobench is distributed under the terms of the GNU Public Licence, a copy of which may be found in the file "LICENCE".

Manifest

The 'autobench' package comprises the following programs:

autobench - A command-line wrapper for httperf which runs httperf a number of times against a target host, producing a CSV or TSV format file for later analysis/graphing.

autobench_admin - The administrative controller for distributed autobench. Used to issue commands to a cluster of machines running autobenchd, in order to conduct synchronised multiple-client benchmarks against a target host. Collates the results from all the clients in the cluster, and outputs CSV or TSV format file as with autobench.

autobenchd - The client dameon for distributed autobench. Listens for commands from autobench_admin, and runs httperf to benchmark the target host. Summarises the results and returns them to autobench_admin for collation.

bench2graph - Takes TSV benchmark results files produced by autobench or autobench_admin and plots them using gnuplot.

crfile - small utility for rapidly creating files filled with random data of a specified size. Useful for creating data sets for benchmarking.

sesslog - Creates session logs for use with the --wsesslog argument of httperf from NCSA Combined or NCSA Common Log Format web access logs. Useful for generating real-life workloads from your log files.

Man pages are included for all of the above.

Installation

See the file "INSTALL" for installation instructions.

Use

Autobench can be used in one of two modes. In the non-distributed mode, a single autobench client runs benchmarks against one or two servers. See the "autobench(1)" man page for details of this mode.

The distributed mode allows a server to be benchmarked using several clients simultaneously (reducing the risk that the clients themselves will become the bottleneck). See the "autobench_admin(1)" and "autobenchd(1)" man pages for details.