Benchmark

Goals

The final goal is to show the abilities of the applicants in programming, managing a repository, define a documentation, etc. for a simple software project.

This work requires a bit of Go, Docker and network distributed services knowledge.

It is required to implement a client that emulates the basic functionality of Apache Benchmark (ab) for measuring performance of an HTTP service. At least, the client must implement the -n, -c and -k parameters of ab (see jig/docker-ab/README.md) and provide latency and TPS of the service.

It shall be implemented on Linux. You may use virtualisation for that, but assign all cores you have to it and enough RAM memory to help you understand the performance behaviour of your system.

Tasks

1. execute Apache's ab on your computer to test a simple web server. You may use nginx, tomcat or other web servers to understand the typical numbers of latency vs. TPS depending on the concurrency (-c). Try to understand the figures you obtain and reason about it. Check the usage of CPU (e.g. with top) and try to obtain the best configuration for best performance. Verify that all connections end up with no error. If you obtain errors analyse why they appeared.

2. implement ab in Go (goab) including the -n, -c and -k parameters. Test your HTTP server of choice with goab. Compare results with ab to verify your implementation is sound. Implement following metrics:

   • Transactions Per Second (TPS)
   • Average latency
   • Errored responses (amount, percentage %)

3. implement an HTTP server in Go (httpserver). Compare results with the off the shelf server of you your choice.

Study resources

• A Tour of Go