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'lb' is a Libevent-based benchmarking tool for HTTP servers

           (C) Copyright 2009-2016
    Rocco Carbone <rocco /at/ tecsiel /dot/ it>

Released under the terms of 3-clause BSD License. See included LICENSE file for details.

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This README file includes:

* Hello world!
* Motivation
* Features
* Licensing
* Download
* Requirements
* Platforms
* Installation
* Documentation
* Bugs
* References

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• Hello world!

  rocco@tar.tecsiel.it 6238> ./lb -n 15000 -c 40 http://tar.tecsiel.it:1234/ http://thor.tecsiel.it:1234/ This is lb ver. 0.2.6 (compiled Jul 11 2016) running on tar.tecsiel.it linked to libevent-2.0.22-stable Copyright (c) 2009-2016 Rocco Carbone, Pisa, Italy - Released under 3-clause BSD license - http://lb.tecsiel.it

  lb: #2 HTTP servers - benchmark session started at Mon Jul 11 17:33:25 2016 lb: #2 HTTP servers - benchmark session stopped at Mon Jul 11 17:33:52 2016

  Server Software: wsl (minimal web server based on libevent-2.0.22-stable) Server Hostname: tar Server Port: 1234

  Document Path: / Document Length: 4096 bytes ( 4.0 Kb)

  Concurrency Level: 40 Time taken for tests: 2.346 secs Complete requests: 15000 Failed requests: 0 Write errors: 0 Total transferred: 63990000 bytes ( 61.0 MB) HTML transferred: 61440000 bytes ( 58.0 MB) Requests per second: 6393.34 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 6.257 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 0.156 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 26634.67 [Kbytes/sec] received Time per request: 0.13/0.15/16.69 min/avg/max [msec]

  Server Software: wsl (minimal web server based on libevent-2.0.22-stable) Server Hostname: thor Server Port: 1234

  Document Path: / Document Length: 1024 bytes ( 1.0 Kb)

  Concurrency Level: 40 Time taken for tests: 26.536 secs Complete requests: 15000 Failed requests: 0 Write errors: 0 Total transferred: 17910000 bytes ( 17.0 MB) HTML transferred: 15360000 bytes ( 14.0 MB) Requests per second: 565.26 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 70.764 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 1.769 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 659.09 [Kbytes/sec] received Time per request: 1.66/1.76/11.20 min/avg/max [msec]

• Motivation

  While reading Niels Provos's blog at http://www.provos.org/index.php?/archives/61-Small-Libevent-2.0-Performance-Test.html I was really intrigued about the test scenarios he described there and the performance values he reported.

  I would have like to start the same tests here on my network to evaluate the performances of my own Libevent-based web server applications. And I would like to match my own implementation against those described in the blog in order to learn from Libevent authors about their best coding practices to improve application performances. Nothing is better than learning from the gurus.

  But unfortunately the sample programs used in the test scenarios were not available neither for downloading nor for reading.

  While thinking all such kind of these things, I am also convinced about another big question that arises reading such blog.

  Why an external benchmark tool (the Apache benchmark tool 'ab' in that case) had been used for these benchmarks? Why Libevent does not have such kind of tools in its source distribution?

  So for a moment I forgot the 'server side' implementations and started to think to the 'client side' ones.

  Could 'ab' should be easily re-implemented using the 'Libevent'? And how much fast it will be with respect to the so popular 'ab' counterparty?

  So I decided to write my own Libevent-based benchmark tool and called it 'lb' that is an acronym for "libevent-based benchmark" tool.

  My goals are to extend the so popular 'ab' in order to:

  o allow to execute benchmarks with several different HTTP servers at the same time

  o allow to read the list of HTTP servers from a file

  o print output in a way as close as possible 'ab' already does in order to guarantee backward compatibility for users/scripts using the tool

  So the 'lb' tool aims to provide a safe and quick replacement for the Apache 'ab' tool. Since its first release it comes with the ability to benchmark several HTTP servers at the same time, being its number teorically limited only by operating system limits.

• Features

  o Provides a tool for HTTP servers to:

  • benchmark several servers at the same time and report per-server information

  • read the list of HTTP servers to benchmark from a file

  • be as backward compatible as possible with the output produced by 'ab'

• Licensing

  'lb', the Libevent-based benchmark tool, is released under the terms of 3-clause BSD License; see included LICENSE file for more information.

• Download

  You can download the source code and documentation at:

  https://github.com/rcarbone/lb

• Requirements

  'lb' is an application written using the Libevent library:

  Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Niels Provos provos@citi.umich.edu Copyright (c) 2007-2012 Niels Provos and Nick Mathewson

  For the purpose to start learning more about the features available with new series of Libevent-2.x I decided to developed 'lb' from the Libevent git code, which at the time of writing can be found at:

  git clone https://github.com/libevent/libevent

  You need this version because I have used latest available API, in particular the evtimer_assign() and evhttp_connection_base_new() functions available only with the Libevent-2.x series are used.

• Platforms

  o i686 running Linux 2.6.26 o sparc sun4u running Solaris 10

  Just to be clear, my development environment is on an Intel-based box running a testing Debian GNU/Linux distribution, but I think the effort to port 'lb' on different un*x where the Libevent is already available should be only a compilation issue

• Installation

  1> mkdir somedir 2> cd somedir 3> git clone https://github.com/libevent/libevent 5> cd libevent 6> ./configure && make 7> git clone https://github.com/rcarbone/lb 7> cd lb 8> ./configure --with-libevent=.. 9> make

• Documentation

Most documentation is in the README. But I am sure the documentation is so far to be terminated because a lot of functionalities need to be documented.

• Bugs

There are no mailing lists for 'lb' at this time.

Bugs can be reported to the lb's author Rocco Carbone via email at: <rocco /at/ tecsiel /dot/ it>

• References

  http://www.monkey.org/~provos/libevent http://httpd.apache.org

lb