What is the easiest way to benchmark a webserver? [closed]

Question

I want to compare my home server (Debian 6) and Amazon EC2 (Ubuntu 10.04)

Is there a program that I can simply and download and run to get the comparison values?

I want to compare harddrive I/O, CPU, memory and etc.

Answer 1

To measure actual throughput Apachebench is simple but can give you a good first approximation.

After that perhaps you should look into a tool like Jmeter, which allows you to save test cases relevant to your websites and do stress testing using them.

On Debian the respective packages are apache2-utils and jmeter.

If you want to stress test the server itself you can run bonnie++ locally for I/O testing.

To get a comparable approximation on the CPU speed I always run openssl speed. It has the advantage of already being there on the majority of servers.