Gstone, from the University of Minnesota,
is a speed benchmark developed as part of the
Web66 technology project.
GStone returns two measures of speed: the number of
milliseconds to open a connection and the number of milliseconds it takes to transmit 1 KB
of data. At this point, GStone isn't publicly available, but the test results from the GStone
test team are online for you to study.
Technovations International's WebSizr
WebSizr, from Technovations
International, is a commercial benchmark that works from the configurable-is-better
philosophy. WebSizr is designed to let you test a specific HTTP configuration. While the
other benchmarking software covered in this article measures GET commands, WebSizr
supports POST and authentication transactions as well. Also, unlike the other programs,
WebSizr lets you monitor statistics as the test is running. WebSizr exports results to an
HTML page. It runs under Microsoft Windows NT (3.51) and Win95 (although the server
tested can run under any platform). WebSizr touts ease of use as one of its benefits over the
other benchmarks. Its setup screen is shown below.
You can download WebSizr for evaluation. Technovations also offers support and
consulting services. Contact the company for price information (Technovations
International Inc., 98 Burlington Street , Lexington, MA 02173; phone 617-860-7999 ).
Neal Nelson Web Server Benchmark
Neal Nelson Associates is another consulting service specializing in performance testing
and evaluation. They have their own benchmark software which requires a specialized lab
setup. For this reason, they primarily lease the software to manufacturers. Alternately, they
will be happy to run benchmarks for you in their fully equipped lab (contact Julene DuPuy
at 312-755-1000, or email neal@nna.com for
details).
Neal Nelson Associates profiles Web servers' performance over a wide range of user
loads. The company leans toward the non-customization philosophy, and maintains that
their default configuration immediately delivers more useful information than that of
WebStone, since its large file sizes analyze the realms of fully cached and primarily
physical disk I/O. Because serving files off disks is significantly slower than serving them
from memory, it is important for performance evaluation that your results show at what
point that happens. Neal Nelson technicians can customize the script for you, however.
