Last month, we looked at some of the issues that affect PHP performance and explored PHP caches and optimizers, two kinds of add-ons that can provide a substantial performance boost to your PHP web applications. Rather than dig into any of those products (they all have sufficient documentation and good support communities), let’s focus on a related issue: performance testing. Or, said another way, once you’ve installed a performance boosting add-on or made a configuration change, how can you determine if it’s helping or hurting?
Last month, we looked at some of the issues that affect PHP performance and explored PHP caches and optimizers, two kinds of add-ons that can provide a substantial performance boost to your PHP web applications. Rather than dig into any of those products (they all have sufficient documentation and good support communities), let’s focus on a related issue: performance testing. Or, said another way, once you’ve installed a performance boosting add-on or made a configuration change, how can you determine if it’s helping or hurting?
Benchmarking and stress testing is a complex topic — especially on large, multi-tier web applications. Completing a valid, comprehensive benchmark of a complex application can take weeks of planning and development and is well beyond the scope of this article. So, let’s cover some basic ideas and introduce some of the tools you’ll need to get started.
When It’s Already Bad
It’s easiest to notice (but quite difficult to properly measure) improvements in performance when your system is already stressed. When your site is slower than you’d like, or when you’re serving fewer requests per second than you’d like, or when visitors complain of timeouts, you know you’ve got a problem. After installing an add-on or making a configuration change, you really shouldn’t have much trouble noticing if things improve. If you’re in doubt, simply go back to the original symptom and ask a few questions: Are you serving more requests per second than before? Are fewer users complaining? Does…
Please log in to view this content.
Not Yet a Member?
Register with LinuxMagazine.com and get free access to the entire archive, including:
