Web server benchmarking is the process of estimating a web server performance in order to find if the server can serve sufficiently high workload.
Key parameters The performance is usually measured in terms of: Number of requests that can be served per second (depending on the type of request, etc.); Latency response time in milliseconds for each new connection or request; Throughput in bytes per second (depending on file size, cached or not cached content, available network bandwidth, etc.).
The measurements must be performed under a varying load of clients and requests per client.
Tools for benchmarking Load testing (stress/performance testing) a web server can be performed using automation/analysis tools such as: Apache JMeter, an open-source Java load testing tool ApacheBench (or ab), a command line program bundled with Apache HTTP Server Siege, an open-source web-server load testing and benchmarking tool Wrk, an open-source C load testing tool Locust, an open-source Python load testing tool
Web application benchmarks Web application benchmarks measure the performance of application servers and database servers used to host web applications. TPC-W was a common benchmark emulating an online bookstore with synthetic workload generation.
References
External links Microsoft's patterns & practices Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications Stress tools to test your Web server at Microsoft's knowledge base
SPECweb2009 Release 1.20 Benchmark Design Document HTTP(S) benchmark tools, testing/debugging h2load - HTTP/2 benchmarking tool - HOW-TO