Testing Our Sample Application

In the previous chapter, we understood the basic use of the Apache Bench to test a third party website. In this section, we will use this tool to test a web application on our own server. To keep the tutorial self-contained to the extent possible, we have chosen to install a python application for the demonstration purpose; you can choose any other language like PHP or Ruby depending on your expertise level.

Installing Python

Generally, Python is installed by default on Linux servers.

Installing Bottle Framework and Creating a Simple Application

Bottle is a micro-framework written in python for creating web applications, and pip is a python package manager. Type the following command in terminal to install Bottle −

$ sudo apt-get install python-pip
$ sudo pip install bottle

Let us now create a small Bottle application. For that, create a directory and move inside it −

$ mkdir webapp
$ cd webapp

We will create a new python script, app.py, inside the webapp directory −

$ vim app.py

Now, write the following code in the app.py file −

from bottle import Bottle, run

app = Bottle()

@app.route('/')
@app.route('/hello')
def hello():
   return "Hello World!"

run(app, host = 'localhost', port = 8080)

When you have added the above lines, save and close the file. Having saved the file, we can run the python script to launch the application −

$ python app.py

Output

Bottle v0.12.7 server starting up (using WSGIRefServer())...
Listening on http://localhost:8080/
Hit Ctrl-C to quit.

This output shows that our application is running on the local machine at the host http://localhost and listening on the port 8080.

Let us check if our app is responding properly to the HTTP requests. As this terminal cannot take any input without quitting serving the Bottle application, we need to login to our VPS with another terminal. After logging into the VPS with another terminal, you can navigate to your application by typing the following code in the new terminal.

$ lynx http://localhost:8080/

Lynx is a command line browser and is usually installed by default in various Linux distributions like Debian and Ubuntu. If you see the following output, it means your app is working fine.

Output

Lynx

If you see the above output, that means our application is live and ready for testing.

Testing the Application with Developmental Web Server

Please note that there is a bug in ab, and it is not able to test the application on the localhost. So we will change the host from localhost to 127.0.0.1 in the app.py file. So the file will change to the following −

from bottle import Bottle, run

app = Bottle()

@app.route('/')
@app.route('/hello')
def hello():
   return "Hello World!"

run(app, host = '127.0.0.1', port = 8080)

Let us now test our app by typing the following command on the same terminal on which ran the lynx command −

$ ab -n 100 -c 10  http://127.0.0.1:8080/hello

Output

This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1604373 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking 127.0.0.1 (be patient).....done


Server Software:        WSGIServer/0.1
Server Hostname:        127.0.0.1
Server Port:            8080

Document Path:          /hello
Document Length:        12 bytes

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   0.203 seconds
Complete requests:      100
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      16500 bytes
HTML transferred:       1200 bytes
Requests per second:    493.78 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       20.252 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       2.025 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          79.56 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   0.1      0       0
Processing:     1    6  28.2      2     202
Waiting:        1    6  28.2      2     202
Total:          1    6  28.2      2     202

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%      2
  66%      2
  75%      2
  80%      2
  90%      2
  95%      2
  98%    202
  99%    202
 100%    202 (longest request)

While the output on the first terminal will be (100 times) as follows −

...
127.0.0.1 - - [10/Jun/2017 04:30:26] "GET /hello HTTP/1.0" 200 12
127.0.0.1 - - [10/Jun/2017 04:30:26] "GET /hello HTTP/1.0" 200 12
127.0.0.1 - - [10/Jun/2017 04:30:26] "GET /hello HTTP/1.0" 200 12   
...

You can observe how the various values of the ab outcome have changed as compared to the initial test.

Testing the Application with a Multi-Threaded Web Server

In the previous tests of ab, we have used the default web server bundled in the Bottle framework.

Now we will change the single-threaded default web server with a multi-threaded one. Therefore, let us install a multi-threaded web server library like cherrypy or gunicorn and tell Bottle to use it. We have chosen gunicorn for the demonstration purpose here (you can choose some other one too) −

$  sudo apt-get install gunicorn

And modify the file, that is change from the default web server to gunicorn −

...
run(server = 'gunicorn'...)
...

Let us test the app in the second terminal.

$ ab -n 100 -c 10  http://127.0.0.1:8080/hello

Output

This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1604373 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking 127.0.0.1 (be patient).....done


Server Software:        gunicorn/19.0.0
Server Hostname:        127.0.0.1
Server Port:            8080

Document Path:          /hello
Document Length:        12 bytes

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   0.031 seconds
Complete requests:      100
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      17200 bytes
HTML transferred:       1200 bytes
Requests per second:    3252.77 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       3.074 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.307 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          546.36 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    1   0.9      0       4
Processing:     1    2   0.7      3       4
Waiting:        0    2   0.8      2       3
Total:          2    3   0.6      3       5
WARNING: The median and mean for the initial connection time are not within a normal
        deviation These results are probably not that reliable.
WARNING: The median and mean for the processing time are not within a normal deviation
        These results are probably not that reliable.

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%      3
  66%      3
  75%      3
  80%      3
  90%      4
  95%      5
  98%      5
  99%      5
 100%      5 (longest request)

Observe how the Requests per second increased from 493 to 3252. It means gunicorn is suitable as a production server for python apps.

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