What is the easiest and fastest way to get statistics of a webservice response time?

Question

I implemented a webservice with node.js and want to test its response time. I don't just want to do the test with one connection attempt, but I want statistics about multiple attempts, telling me the average response time and maybe even things like standard deviation and min/max.

What is a good tool or webservice to do this?

Answer 1

This blog post looks like it has a lot of useful information for what you want: http://www.mnot.net/blog/2011/05/18/http_benchmark_rules

It describes using autobench.

Answer 2

From a Unix (or Mac) command line, you can use the 'ping' command with the 'count' option to check the response from the server as many times as you like.

For example:

ping -c 50 www.google.com

This will ping www.google.com 50 times. The final two lines of output will give you the packet loss, minimum, average, maximum, and standard deviation:

50 packets transmitted, 48 packets received, 4.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 19.347/21.268/25.521/1.268 ms

On Windows you can do the same thing in the Command Prompt (command.exe) using -n for the count instead of -c:

ping -n 50 www.google.com

For more detailed response time information, you might like to Google for 'load testing services'. To create more detailed response tests in situations where, for example, you need to log in to the site first, you could code your own tests using a headless browser such as PhantomJS or ZombieJS, which also uses node.js.

Answer 3

PING is a relatively poor measure of response time because of the protocol that it is based on, ICMP. Traceroute is also based upon ICMP.

• ICMP has the lowest priority of any protocol on the network and can be discarded by routers and such if a higher priority protocol is present.
• ICMP is also disabled on many hosts as it has been used to create denial of services attacks
• PING's data flow structure is not representative of the complex series of dataflows, many asymmetric in nature, that are used by business processes which cross networks

PING can tell if you can get there from here....in most cases....where ICMP responses have not been disabled. Traceroute can tell you what the path looks like. But they cannot tell you the relative response time of your business process.