How can you test your web server speed?

Question

Our website seems to be slower than it used to be, how can I test that? And is there a way to find the cause? (eg too many visitors).

Thanks.

Answer 1

There is a rather good tool for performance benchmarking of web servers: Jakarta Jmeter, which is an Apache project, so it's rather well supported and tested.

The key to be able to pinpoint the cause would be to do benchmarking regularly, so you can actually match changes in your benchmark results with events on your server: upgrades, code changes, variations in the number of visitors...

Answer 2

The Firebug add on for Firefox has a Net tab which is useful for debugging issues and testing. Also Fiddler on Windows is nice. And then there is the age old tradition of checking your server error logs for any problems.

Answer 3

A good first step is to make sure you are keeping fairly complete server logs and feed them into a log analyser. This is helpful for giving you a general idea of how long things take and which pages are slowest. It's also a good idea to check your error logs to make sure things are working properly.

Beyond that, things get more complicated as you may need to isolate your webserver, code and database to see if one of these is the bottleneck. Also, Jeff's blog, coding horror had a recent entry on server optimization.

Answer 4

Use Google Analytics to track your site's visitors over time to find out if you are getting more traffic.

You tagged your question with shared-hosting - being on a shared host means that someone else's code running on the same machine as your may be affecting your site's performance.

I'd suggest going with Varkhan and apphacker's suggestion to make sure your site's code is reasonably quick. use Analytics to get some stats and the possibly, depending on how many visitors you are getting and how slow the site is, consider moving away from a shared host.