“Design depends largely on constraints.” — Charles Eames
Tuesday, 1 May 2007
Martin Arlitt makes an exciting announcement;
It is my pleasure to announce two new versions of httperf: 0.8.1 and 0.9.0. version 0.8.1 fixes the known bugs in version 0.8, which was released almost 7 years ago. The primary new feature in 0.9.0 is improved portability. It has been tested on
HP-UX 11i (64-bit PA-RISC and IA-64)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (AMD64 and IA-64)
SUSE Linux 10.1 (i386)
openSUSE 10.2 (i386)
OpenBSD 4.0 (i386)
FreeBSD 6.0 (AMD64)
Solaris 8 (UltraSparc 64-bit)
httperf is great for testing performance (especially raw proxy and server performance) because it gives more detailed statistics, can sustain overload against a server, and with autobench can drive it on multiple clients.
For example, it’s often easy to unknowingly test the client or the network, rather than the target server. httperf’s output tells you exactly what kinds of errors it encountered, as well as what resources it used, so that you can figure out whether you’ve run out of server capacity or just run out of ephemeral ports (or file descriptors, or…).
This set of releases fixes a number of long-standing bugs, and sets the stage more more interesting development in the future. If you’re at WWW2007 next week, make sure to check out Ted Bullock’s talk on Thursday.
Filed under: Web, Web Services