[ic] failures with apache bench

[Scott Lewis]

howdy all,

i'm a happy user of interchange, but i'm trying to speed up my site.

i've run ab (apache bench) for several different pages.

for the index page of construct, i get many failures (9 out of 10) due 
to length. this is even with only one concurrent request. this is a 
clean install of interchange, standard construct catalog.

i also tried ab on a page served by interchange, but with no 
interchange tags. this works fine, no failures, even with up to 30 
concurrent requests.

any ideas where to look for the problem? neither the interchange 
error.log nor the apache error_log show anything.

another question regarding the average connection times reported 
by ab:

construct index page: 697 ms
interchange page w/ no tags: 230 ms
plain html file served by apache: 1 ms

are these times anything i should be concerned with?

this is with ab running on the same machine as 
interchange/webserver, necessary since i don't have another 
machine on that network. this is a production machine, so there 
could be other web traffic occuring at the same time. but in general 
traffic to the site is not very high. the load before and after the tests 
was 0.10-0.18.

below are listed system details and the output from ab.

thanks in advance for any help,

-scott lewis

system details
-------------------
PIII 600 mhz
256 mb memory
openbsd 2.7
interchange 4.6.5 using vlink
apache 1.3.12

interchange.cfg settings
--------------------------------
MaxServers 0
Housekeeping 1

apache bench on construct index page
---------------------------------------------------

% ab -n 10 http://www.balticave.com/cgi/construct/index.html

Benchmarking www.balticave.com (be patient)...                            
Server Software:        Apache/1.3.12
Server Hostname:        www.balticave.com
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /cgi/construct/index.html
Document Length:        29441 bytes

Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   6.974 seconds
Complete requests:      10
Failed requests:        9
   (Connect: 0, Length: 9, Exceptions: 0)
Total transferred:      297397 bytes
HTML transferred:       294477 bytes
Requests per second:    1.43
Transfer rate:          42.64 kb/s received

Connnection Times (ms)
              min   avg   max
Connect:        0     0     0
Processing:   589   697  1097
Total:        589   697  1097

apache bench on interchange page with no tags
---------------------------------------------------

% ab -n 10 http://www.balticave.com/cgi/construct/notags.html

Benchmarking www.balticave.com (be patient)...                            
Server Software:        Apache/1.3.12
Server Hostname:        www.balticave.com
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /cgi/construct/notags.html
Document Length:        2334 bytes

Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   2.307 seconds
Complete requests:      10
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      26270 bytes
HTML transferred:       23340 bytes
Requests per second:    4.33
Transfer rate:          11.39 kb/s received

Connnection Times (ms)
              min   avg   max
Connect:        0     0     0
Processing:   180   230   284
Total:        180   230   284

apache bench on plain HTML page served by apache
---------------------------------------------------

% ab -n 10 http://www.balticave.com/index.html

Benchmarking www.balticave.com (be patient)...                            
Server Software:        Apache/1.3.12
Server Hostname:        www.balticave.com
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /index.html
Document Length:        2334 bytes

Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   0.024 seconds
Complete requests:      10
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      26310 bytes
HTML transferred:       23340 bytes
Requests per second:    416.67
Transfer rate:          1096.25 kb/s received

Connnection Times (ms)
              min   avg   max
Connect:        0     0     0
Processing:     1     1     3
Total:          1     1     3