Web Performance and Load Testing Tools for Linux

Curl - Give detailed response time for loading a page

ab - ApacheBench request generator tool, generate get requests to specified URL

pingdom.com - Full Page load waterfallTest your webpage from remote locations like New York, San Jose.

seige - Siege is an http load testing and benchmarking utility, supports basic authentication, cookies, HTTP, HTTPS

Using CURL to test website response time.

Detailed timing of a website response

The following command returns lookup, connect, pretransfer, starttransfer time in seconds and the total time that the full operation lasted.

$ curl -s -w '\nLookup time:\t%{time_namelookup}\nConnect time:\t%{time_connect}\nPreXfer time:\t%{time_pretransfer}\nStartXfer time:\t%{time_starttransfer}\n\nTotal time:\t%{time_total}\n' -o /dev/null http://www.shellhacks.com

Sample output:

Lookup time:    0,004
Connect time:   0,022
PreXfer time:   0,022
StartXfer time: 0,068

Total time:     0,125

Brief options description:

Option	Description
Lookup time (time_namelookup)	The time, in seconds, it took from the start until the name resolving was completed
Connect time (time_connect)	The time, in seconds, it took from the start until the TCP connect to the remote host was completed
PreXfer time (time_pretransfer)	The time, in seconds, it took from the start until the file transfer was just about to begin. This includes all ‘pre-transfer’ commands and negotiations that are specific to the particular protocol(s) involved
StartXfer time (time_starttransfer)	The time, in seconds, it took from the start until the first byte was just about to be transferred. This includes ‘time_pretransfer’ and also the time the server needed to calculate the result

More detailed timing of a website response

The following command adds appconnect and redirect time in seconds, to the previous report. These options are available in a latest versions of CURL.

$ curl -s -w '\nLookup time:\t%{time_namelookup}\nConnect time:\t%{time_connect}\nAppCon time:\t%{time_appconnect}\nRedirect time:\t%{time_redirect}\nPreXfer time:\t%{time_pretransfer}\nStartXfer time:\t%{time_starttransfer}\n\nTotal time:\t%{time_total}\n' -o /dev/null http://www.shellhacks.com

Sample output:

Lookup time:    0,003
Connect time:   0,020
AppCon time:    0,000
Redirect time:  0,000
PreXfer time:   0,020
StartXfer time: 0,963

Total time:     1,001

Brief options description:

Option	Description
AppCon time (time_appconnect)	The time, in seconds, it took from the start until the SSL/SSH/etc connect/handshake to the remote host was completed (Added in 7.19.0)
Redirect time (time_redirect)	The time, in seconds, it took for all redirection steps include name lookup, connect, pretransfer and transfer before the final transaction was started. ‘time_redirect’ shows the complete execution time for multiple redirections. (Added in 7.12.3)

Use --version to see if your CURL supports these options.

$ curl --version

ab

ab is installed as part of apache, but you can install it seperate with:

yum install ab

ab -n 100 -c 5 http://localhost/drupal-7.28/

Results of load testing with changes outlined below with Drupal 7