Any good apache+linux benchmarks out there?

[wizard at neonedge.com (Wizard)]

> Not unrelated to my earlier question:  The folks who asked  me  about
> good  ways to put zillions of little files on a system have also been
> wondering what is the best hardware at the moment for a  web  server.
> This  of  course  changes, probably on a weekly basis.  They are very
> partial to apache and linux, for all the usual reasons. Their current
> estimate is an average of maybe 50 requests per second. I'd take that
> as order-of-magnitude, but it's a useful talking point. Anything less
> would probably be too slow.  They aren't fazed by big RAID boxes with
> a terabyte of data; they already have those up and running.

The most common benchmark for web servers is SPECweb99 at
http://www.specbench.org/, but this is really only a general test tool
primarily for commercial web servers (although Apache and TUX are
occasionally tested).
   What you really need to do is look at it from the standpoint of what
you're using the server for. Many installations of Apache that I have seen
could easily be re-configured to improve performance by as much as 100%
(based on throughput, not simultaneous connections). If it's throughput that
you are concerned about, I would try to clone the machine(s) and perform
load-testing on it and see how the changes that you make affect the
throughput. This includes the filesystem layout as you previously mentioned,
as well as things such as statically building Apache with only the modules
that you are using, writing appropriate configuration files that are limited
to only security and the features that you absolutely need, only logging if
and what you need to, etc. You may also look at different hardware to see
how that performs.
   Also if you don't already have it, you should think about getting
"Apache: The Definitive Guide" from O'Reilly
(http://www.bookpool.com/.x/sxnbkoj9p0/sm/1565925289).
Good luck,
Grant M.