Simple HTTP benchmarks with ab

The ab tool from Apache is a simple command line program for benchmarking, included in the httpd-tools rpm package in Fedora. The below command shows how to benchmark http://example.com/ with 4 total requests using 2 concurrent connections:

ab -n 4 -c 2 http://example.com/

There are a lot of options as the -H for a custom HTTP header or the -p for POST data from a file!