ApacheBench is a command line computer program for measuring the performance of HTTP web servers, in particular the Apache HTTP Server. It was designed to give an idea of the performance that a given Apache installation can provide. In particular, it shows how many requests per second the server is capable of serving. The ab tool comes bundled with the standard Apache source distribution, and like the Apache web server itself, is free, open source software and distributed under the terms of the Apache License.
Detecting ApacheBench
The ApacheBench User Agent string is the following: ApacheBench/MAJV.MINV where MAJV and MINV represent the major and minor version numbers of the program. It is usually not correctly categorised by web server log analysers such as Webalizer or AWStats, so running ApacheBench with a great number of requests may skew the results of the reports generated by these programs.
