Graphing ApacheBench Results Using GnuPlot

Ab / ApacheBench is a tool commonly used to perform benchmark by many people. unfortunately, the results are displayed somewhat difficult to read by most people. but it can be tricked by turning it into a plot image. this time, I will make examples how to change the results of apachebench into a form of image plots using gnuplot. although apachebench’s report is very helpful, we need to output the data in a parse-able format. To do this we use the -g switch which will output a gnuplot-friendly tab delimited table of data.

First we need to installed gnuplot if we don’t have it yet.

In this example i’ll benchmark request on static png file.

Run first webserver benchmark

Run second webserver benchmark

Example result server1.txt/server2.txt

Now we’ll convert tab delimited tables datas into a nice image plot

Create plot template file called template.p, so it can be re-used easily for later test.

Run gnuplot to generate graph

Here’s an example of gnuplot graph