Ok, so you’ve got your web app together, spent months perfecting it, a little worried about the 25 include files per page, or your class inheritance hierarchy that often goes 5 levels deep – what do you do?

One way to benchmark the performance of your scripts is ab – the  Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool.  The only caveat, if your webserver is on a windows platform you’re going to have to look for something else

ab is a simple command line benchmarking tool that comes standard with the Apache package.  With it you can execute a series of requests against any given page in your app and extract performance statistics.  Experimenting with the command line switches you can force concurrent requests, the HTTP KeepAlive feature, tweak headers and more.