How to use ApacheBench for web server performance testing

ApacheBench is a command-line tool used to measure the performance of web servers by inundating them with HTTP requests and recording metrics for latency and success. It can help determine how much traffic your server can sustain before performance degrades, and set baselines for typical response times. The tool provides various metrics such as request latency, connection status, and success rates. ApacheBench is not limited to testing the Apache web server but can be used to test any backend that processes HTTP requests. It has some constraints like needing enough CPU resources and memory available on the host running the tests. To interpret ApacheBench results, one should consider top-level latency metrics, aggregated connection times, percentiles, and latency of individual requests. Additionally, success metrics such as non-2xx responses and failed requests can be tracked to understand the types of responses your web servers are returning.