“Unfair” Apache performance comparison

To find out how fast our new servers are I run a small test using ab Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool.

I’ll send 10,000 requests using 10 simultaneous processes, I run the same test on both old and new server:

Old Server

$ ab -c 10 -n 10000 www.alriyadh.com/zzz.txt

:

Time taken for tests:   78.172 seconds

:

New Server

$ ab -c 10 -n 10000 new-www.alriyadh.com/zzz.txt

:

Time taken for tests:   3.851 seconds

:

This mean that the new server is 20 times faster than the old server, the test is really unfair because the old server is running on production and serving other requests. I’ll repeat the same test after migration to see the real numbers.

Update: I repeated the test on the old server after migration, and the time taken dropped to 32.316 seconds.