It is not exactly an Nginx question then :)

Something cheap-ish and simple-ish is to create your own scripts to hit your
sites in a way that you know will or will not trigger cache hits and
expensive queries.

Chuck in some Apache Bench hits and judge the timings yourself...

2009/6/28 Ilan Berkner

> Just to clarify, I'm not specifically looking for how Nginx performs, but
> rather how our site performs, being that its a dynamic, php site and
> relatively quiet during the summer time (i.e. a good time to test) so I'm
> looking for a tool recommendation to simulate load as well as how to best
> process that information.
>
> Thank you for the advise, I'll take a look at some of the tool
> recommendations.
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 9:50 AM, zepolen wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 5:06 PM, Ilan Berkner wrote:
>> > I haven't done stress testing in a long time... so I'm not sure what the
>> > best tools are, specifically for our nginx site
>>
>> Rarely will nginx itself be the bottleneck. For example:
>>
>> ab testing serving a single image will probably show anywhere from
>> 10,000 - 20,000 req/s, that is because is because after the first
>> access, it will be in ram and can be served fast and efficiently from
>> there on. However in a real production environment, where you might be
>> serving thousands of _different_ files - when the os file cache (in
>> ram) fills up, those 10,000req/s will become about 300req/s, and in a
>> worst case scenario (where every request is an os cache miss), it
>> becomes entirely disk seek bound (which is why SSD hard disk are great
>> for this sort of job).
>>
>>
>