Re: Stress testing a web server

[Aristotle]

You might want to have a look at LWP::Parallel - something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

use LWP::Parallel::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request; 

my $url = "http://localhost/foo/";

my $pua = LWP::Parallel::UserAgent->new();
$pua->nonblock(1);   # accell. connection
$pua->redirect(1);   # follow
$pua->max_req(1000); # simultaneous


while(1) {
    foreach (0 .. 100) {
        my $res = $pua->register(HTTP::Request->new(GET => $url));
        die $res->error_as_HTML if $res;
    }
    $pua->wait(0); # returns hashref
    $pua->initialize;
}

and expanding that to report the number of connections:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

# make sure END block is run
BEGIN { SIG{INT} = sub { exit } }

package myPUA;
use Exporter();
use LWP::Parallel::UserAgent qw(:CALLBACK);

our @ISA = qw(LWP::Parallel::UserAgent Exporter);
our @EXPORT = @LWP::Parallel::UserAgent::EXPORT_OK;

our $connections = 0;
sub on_return { ++$connections; return }

package main;
use HTTP::Request; 
use Time::HiRes qw(time);

my $url = "http://localhost/foo/";

my $pua = myPUA->new();
$pua->nonblock(1);   # accell. connection
$pua->redirect(1);   # follow
$pua->max_req(1000); # simultaneous

my $start = time;

while(1) {
    foreach (0 .. 100) {
        my $res = $pua->register(HTTP::Request->new(GET => $url));
        die $res->error_as_HTML if $res;
    }
    $pua->wait(0); # returns hashref
    $pua->initialize;
}

END {
    my $sec = time - $start;
    print "$myPUA::connections connections in $sec seconds\n";
    printf "%.1f conn/s\n", $myPUA::connections / $sec;
}

Most of this is lifted straight out of the module's POD. Took about 25 minutes to write without any real former exposure to LWP::Parallel. :) Untested.

Makeshifts last the longest.