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

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.