performance tuning

The sections of this tutorial are as follows:

• Brief background on ApacheBench and performance of Drupal Anonymous vs Authenticated Users
• Accessing the cookie containing the Drupal session ID
• Passing the session cookie to ApacheBench
• Verifying that the Drupal installation being benchmarked recognizes the cookie and is serving authenticated Pages

    ApacheBench, also known as 'ab', is a command line program bundled with the Apache Web Server that measures the performance of web servers by making HTTP requests to a user-specified URL. ApacheBench displays statistical information, such as the number of requests served per second and the amount of time taken to serve those requests, that is useful for evaluating (benchmarking) and tuning the performance of a webserver. ApacheBench does a decent job of simulating different types and levels of load on a sever.