Ade in Business

One of the best tools for web application developers has got to be ApacheBench (ab), a program that’s bundled in with the stock Apache distribution. If you’re developing web applications and not using it frequently, you need to.

I was working on some code today and thought, “wouldn’t it be great if I made it do…?” So I made it happen, and decided to benchmark 1000 requests against the new function. Wow. The changes had about doubled the time it took the page to load. So I tried a different algorithm … it brought the page to a relative crawl. In the end, after a couple more rounds of tweaking and testing I ended up getting the page 3 1/2 times faster than it was originally.

I wouldn’t have noticed the speed difference without ApacheBench because each change only resulted in a +/- response time of < 1s. But if the code went on a production box with a lot of simultaneous requests, those microseconds would have quickly added up to a poor user experience.

Sure, it took me a little more time to do this, but if you’re a small MicroISV watching costs, 30 minutes of extra development time here and there is a lot cheaper than buying a new server every time your application gets slow.