Using Apache Bench to load test your website

Apache comes with a cool load testing script called Apache Bench, which lets you throw loads of requests at a URL. It comes bundled with Apache, so if you’re running the LAMP stack, you probably already have it.

The syntax is simple.

ab -n 1000 http://www.google.com/

This will throw a thousand requests at Google and then produce a report on how long it look. You can also use the -c option to set the number of concurrent requests. There are lots more options too – see the Apache docs for full details.