Glossary

The following terms are used in WebStone reports:

Clients

Number of processes or threads simultaneously requesting Web services from the server.

Errors

Any of the following are counted as an "error":

• gettimeofday() returns a failure (the new NT gettimeofday() can fail).
• socket() fails (shortage of local resources).
• connect() fails (could be due to local system networking error, network error such as cables or router, or web server system error).
• error sending request to web server (could be due to local system error such as lack of memory, or network error. Not caused by web server.)
• read() error while reading response from web server. (could be cause by local system, network error, or web server)
• malformed response or HTTP error response code (<200 ||> 300) from web server.
• If the "-s" (save file) option is used then the data received by each request is saved in a file. If there is an error opening this file (directory or disk full) then its an error.

Connections

Any connection attempt that doesn't result in one of the above errors is considered a success and is counted toward the "connection rate".

Throughput

The total number of bits of data received from the web server expressed in megabits per second. This includes the HTTP response header. So reading the 500-byte file ("/file500.html") will add more than 500 to the total bytes. If any of the above errors occur then any bytes read for that request are not counted towards the total. This means that if an error occurs while reading the last byte of the 5 MB file then none of that 5 MB counts towards the total throughput.

Response time

The time measured from before the socket() call which creates the socket descriptor through the close() of that socket. This means that if, for some reason, the call to socket() took a long time then that would be counted towards the reponse time. There are separate counters for measuring how long it took to connect to the web server, how long it took to receive the response header, how long to get the body of the response. If called with the -R option then each webclient will dump these timers into a log but they're otherwise unused. Only successful connections are counted towards the response time.

Latency or average response time

Total amount of response time divided by the total number of successful connections.

Warning

Do not compare WebStone 2.x results with WebStone 1.0 results. WebStone 2.x introduces significant changes in testing methodology and reporting.