investigating apache benchmark failed request

Question

I am just start using AB just today. Read couple of AB tutorial on new and thought give it a try for load testing my site.

After using it couple of time I got huge numbe

Answer 1

Martin is correct. More helpfully, I ran a quick curl against our production servers:

{user@staging:~}$ for i in `seq 1 10`; do curl -sk https://app.copperegg.com/login >    /tmp/lb$i.txt ; done
{user@staging:~}$ wc /tmp/lb*
   74   239  3316 /tmp/lb1.txt
   74   239  3324 /tmp/lb10.txt
   74   239  3320 /tmp/lb2.txt
   74   239  3316 /tmp/lb3.txt
   74   239  3316 /tmp/lb4.txt
   74   239  3316 /tmp/lb5.txt
   74   239  3320 /tmp/lb6.txt
   74   239  3316 /tmp/lb7.txt
   74   239  3316 /tmp/lb8.txt
   74   239  3316 /tmp/lb9.txt
  740  2390 33176 total
{user@staging:~}$ diff /tmp/lb1.txt /tmp/lb10.txt  
7c7
<   var g_time_offset = new Date().getTime() - 1318965621000;
---
>   var g_time_offset = new Date().getTime() - 1318965622000;
15c15
< 
---
> 
23c23
<   

---
>   

{user@staging:~}$ diff /tmp/lb1.txt /tmp/lb2.txt 
7c7
<   var g_time_offset = new Date().getTime() - 1318965621000;
---
>   var g_time_offset = new Date().getTime() - 1318965622000;
9,10c9,10
< 
< 
---
> 
> 
15c15
< 
---
> 
23c23
<   

---
>   

{user@staging:~}$ 

Notice that we're seeing a "content" string that has a nice ugly string of characters. Notice that the '/' character is in the "form" line, but in the "meta" line, it's replaced with "/". This accounts for the 4 or 8 character difference between my request lengths.

It's irritating that apachebench isn't smart able to account for this, but at least we can see the cause.