How to test/compare web server performance?

I am finally beginning to maybe get around to setting up eCommerce site and reducing reliance on other ecommerce platforms.

I did try to register for linode but oddly they just cancelled my registration immediately without a specific reason just a generic email. This really rubbed me the wrong way so I will probably stay with scaleway.

They have 2 packages of interest to me right now: 1. bare metal arm and 2. VPS.

What are some good ways to test and compare them? Is there benchmarking software I can quickly setup to test or should I just setup the ecommerce and clone the system and test both via public testers online like pingdom? The site hosted will likely be very low traffic for now, I imagine 5 concurrent active users with no real slowdown would be enough.

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ddos it :wink:

Great article, thanks for sharing. Sitespeed.io looks very powerful, maybe a bit too involved right now.

Lighthouse is another useful tool

That’s plenty of sales :slight_smile:

A VPS is more than enough horsepower. It’s more about the software.

For example what software stack will you’ll be running? Are you writing an app from scratch, are you using a framework, after you using an existing builder like app?

In either case, you should probably get cloudflare or something similar in front of your server (just in case you have haters or competition) - make sure you don’t serve from the same IP you use to ssh into your machines.

If you use nginx or apache as a reverse proxy between cloudflare/the internet and your site, you’ll get access logs with timing, or when you do your site you can write your own logs after serving each reply. There’s also google analytics that you can use to get some performance numbers straight from your users browsers (depending on adblock etc).

5 concurrent users is probably a lot more than it seems, I guess I am thinking of page views as I plan have quite a lot of product pages.

I plan on using either Debian or Ubuntu with LAMP running PrestaShop as it’s fee and seems to have the features I need without any add-ons. Not sure yet if there is any reason to go with Debian over Ubuntu which is what I am familiar with. Hosts see to only use Debian for “instant apps” they offer.

I will be using cloudflare. Can you elaborate on?:

make sure you don’t serve from the same IP you use to ssh into your machines.

I haven considered this, normally I would just use passwordless login and that’s it.

Keep the publicly accessible IP address of your server hidden … so evil people can’t dos you and make your life miserable. Things like registration emails (their headers) or DNS requests (e.g. I’d you run a resolver on the host) tend to be the usual source or leaks.


Re 5 concurrent users… For small static requests, think maybe ~1000 requests pet second per core/serving thread would be a good starting point. Once you start involving PHP, that number will be lower. Then there’s MySQL, and perhaps memcached. …I’m not familiar with PrestaShop - you’ll have to try it and see. (maybe try hitting some pages with ab or wrk and make sure at least basic browsing is not mind bogglingly ineficient. … If it is, it means you’ll have to read the code to understand why it’s slow most likely.

So how would I go about hiding the public IP? Do mean using cloudflare or something else?

By using some CDN like cloudflare.
Or by creating your own proxy.
Or pay for a VPN with a dedicated IP that does not block ports.

cloudflare (or any of the other cloud CDN providers) is a good start