Server benchmarking: how many http requests can the server process?

Question

I am creating an application which sends the measurement data every 200 ms from mobile phone to the server. The data have to be processed in real-time, but I noticed that the difference between the sent time and the time of process start is getting bigger and bigger so I have to find the point where the the requests get stuck.

I am sending the requests in the httpwebrequest form (http://testserver/submitdata?ax=value1&ay=value2&az=value3) and on the server I am using RESTful service created in WCF.

Anyway is there any benchmarking tool that could test how many requests can be handled by the server or is there any other practical way to determine what can be the maximum number of requests per seconds handled without causig the delay?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The Apache Benchmarking (ab) tool might be a good way to do this (it will work with any HTTP server, not just Apache).

Answer 2

ab is indeed a descent solution. In its simplest form you can run

ab -c 10 -n 100 http://my.page.com/

in order to call the server 100 times and keep 10 requests running concurrently. I have an example at my blog.