Benchy

A simple apachebench visualization tool written in PHP.

ApacheBench is handy, but it makes it really hard to perform any kind of systematic performance analysis. Its output format also sucks for visualization. Benchy tries to make this simpler using stuff most web developers have handy: a web server, a web browser, a CLI PHP interpreter and an Internet connection (because I felt like loading jQuery and Highcharts from a CDN instead of copying them into this project - send me a PR :P).

This is a quick and dirty project but should be pretty handy nonetheless. Hopefully you will be able to defer using JMeter for a while longer with this. It's also prettier than JMeter.

How to install Benchy

Dependencies (doh):

• php
• apachebench
• a web server (now, PHP 5.4 has a built-in webserver. You can call it from the command line using php -S 0.0.0.0:8000 -t .)
• a web browser

Installation steps:

• Just copy the Benchy folder somewhere within your DOCUMENT_ROOT or equivalent (see Note below on why the webserver is necessary)
• If you have a working webserver with PHP, put Benchy within it if you can. Either way, see the usage instructions below.

How to use Benchy

1. Copy config.json.template into config.json

2. Edit config.json to set up your testing preferences (usually the URL at least)

3. Run php benchy.php

4. Depending on your case do one of the following:

   • If you have a working webserver that supports PHP, you can access index.php directly through it.
   • If you don't, just do php index.php > index.html and access index.html instead.

Full example

Say I have a webpage at http://192.168.100.100/mypage/ that is making my production servers weep. I will try and optimize it, but in order to measure the impact of the changes I make, I will use Benchy to keep track of what I'm doing.

I will go into my Benchy folder and wipe whatever is in the data subdirectory to start fresh. Next, I will edit config.json and set the URL to http://192.168.100.100/mypage/

Benchy does a ramp up of concurrency so that you can see the performance trend instead of just an isolated data point. Typically Benchy starts with a single concurrent request and doubles the concurrency all the way up to 128 simultaneous requests. Feel free to adjust this stepping to your needs in config.json.

For this example, I will stick to the default tests setting (1, 2, 4 ... 128).

Next, I will run Benchy:

$ php benchy.php

Benchy will prompt me for a comment that will later help me identify this "run". Because I haven't done anything yet, I just type in baseline as a comment.

Now the fun part - wait until the benchmarking is over. If your code doesn't suck, is should finish in less than a minute with the default settings. Otherwise, just adjust the tests setting in config.json to something that is workable. If your benchmark run takes 30 minutes then you are doing it wrong.

Now, assuming I don't have PHP set up on my server, I will create a Benchy report to check the results:

$ php index.php > index.html

I can now fire up my web browser and go find that very index.html, it should look like this:

Now, I will tweak my code and configuration to see if I can squeeze more performance out of that stupid mypage site. Say I notice the code is using Zend_Json::encode() instead of the native json_encode() which is written in C. I guess I can improve things by replacing that. So I do it, and then:

$ php benchy.php

When prompted for a comment, I will type in with json_encode()

Next, I'll tweak the PHP settings on the server to enable APC. That should make things faster. Again:

$ php benchy.php

When prompted for a comment, I will type in with json_encode() and APC

I will now regenerate the report to see if I have achieved something:

$ php index.php > index.html

Tada :) Just click on the checkboxes to compare the datasets you have, or look at different metrics. Enjoy!

Notes

The webserver is necessary just because your browser will complain about same-origin policies when trying to load the .dat files to plot the graphs. If you know a way of dodging the web server and using file:// URLs, let me know! Sorry :(

Kudos

Benchy was made possible by the cool guys behing apachebench, jQuery and Highcharts.