Replicating Benchmarks

This document explains how to replicate the benchmarks easily on Amazon EC2.

The Machine

The benchmarks are done on Amazon EC2. The AMI is "ami-80446ff4" (EU) or "ami-f0f61599" (US) and the instance type is "c1.xlarge" (High-CPU Extra Large Instance):

• 7 GB of memory
• 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
• 1690 GB of local instance storage
• 64-bit platform

One EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor.

Installation

To install the machine, I have done the following steps:

• add dotdeb repository (/etc/apt/sources.list)

  deb http://php53.dotdeb.org stable all deb-src http://php53.dotdeb.org stable all

• apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

• apt-get install php5 php5-cli php5-dev apache2-dev php-pear lynx siege

• pecl install APC-beta

• edit /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

  date.timezone=Europe/Paris

  extension = apc.so apc.enabled = 1 apc.shm_segments=1 apc.shm_size=128 apc.num_files_hint=1024 apc.gc_ttl=3600 apc.ttl=3600 apc.mmap_file_mask=/tmp/apc.XXXXXX apc.filters= apc.stat=0 apc.enable_cli = 0 apc.include_once_override = 1 apc.max_file_size=4M

• also change the timezone in /etc/php5/cli/php.ini

• edit /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default and remove the line about CustomLog (to avoid tons of logs)

• ulimit -n 99999

• /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

The web root is at /var/www. This is where you should clone the Git repository.

Benchmarks

To run the benchmark, just execute the siege.php script:

php siege.php target.csv
php siege.php target_products.csv