ec2

My name is Greg Coit, sysadmin for Chapter 3 and I've been helping with Mercury development and testing.

We wanted a get a quick idea of how hard we could push mercury under more "real world" circumstances, so I combined siege and ab to generate a broad spectrum of hits. ab (short for apache benchmark and part of the apache2-utils package) allows you to generate a very large number of hits on one url, while siege (a perl script which comes in a self-titled debian/ubuntu package) lets you spread the hits across many urls, most of which won't be cached. This mixed-load is a much more nuanced and accurate way of looking at performance than peak throughput on a single url.