La utilidad “ab” (Apache Benchmark) sirve para hacer pruebas de carga a un servidor apache.

Por ejemplo 100 consultas, con una concurrencia de 5 usuarios a la vez.

ab -n100 -c5 http://www.sitio.com/

No olvidar el “/” final en el URL

Probar con diferentes niveles de concurrencia. Y no olvidar ver las opciones con ab –info pues es batante flexible. A sudar servidores!

Usage: ab [options] [http://]hostname[:port]/path
Options are:
    -n requests     Number of requests to perform
    -c concurrency  Number of multiple requests to make
    -t timelimit    Seconds to max. wait for responses
    -p postfile     File containing data to POST
    -T content-type Content-type header for POSTing
    -v verbosity    How much troubleshooting info to print
    -w              Print out results in HTML tables
    -i              Use HEAD instead of GET
    -x attributes   String to insert as table attributes
    -y attributes   String to insert as tr attributes
    -z attributes   String to insert as td or th attributes
    -C attribute    Add cookie, eg. 'Apache=1234. (repeatable)
    -H attribute    Add Arbitrary header line, eg. 'Accept-Encoding: gzip'
                    Inserted after all normal header lines. (repeatable)
    -A attribute    Add Basic WWW Authentication, the attributes
                    are a colon separated username and password.
    -P attribute    Add Basic Proxy Authentication, the attributes
                    are a colon separated username and password.
    -X proxy:port   Proxyserver and port number to use
    -V              Print version number and exit
    -k              Use HTTP KeepAlive feature
    -d              Do not show percentiles served table.
    -S              Do not show confidence estimators and warnings.
    -g filename     Output collected data to gnuplot format file.
    -e filename     Output CSV file with percentages served
    -h              Display usage information (this message)+

Fuente: http://www.recortex.com/tag/apache/