Need Hardware for PHP Code Cache / Accelerator Benchmarking

One of the books that I’m writing right now has a section on PHP code caches / accelerators. I’d like to include some comparative benchmarks in the book that explore the performance of the different accelerators in various circumstances.



To do the benchmarking properly, though, I need some computers that I don’t have, namely a relatively beefy server on a network with a bunch of client computers that can bombard the server with requests. Perhaps someone has a setup like this that I could run some benchmarks on?



I am most interested in the relative performance of the accelerators, not their absolute performance, so the server doesn’t have to be anything really beefy, just powerful enough that it doesn’t run into problems that are unlikely in the real world (like swapping web server processes to disk when handling five simultaneous requests).



The server should be running Linux (although the presence of a Windows server as well would be a bonus) and the client computers can be running just about anything, as long as they can handle one of the zillion web stress tools out there. The server must be configurable so that while the benchmarks are running, there are no other variable-load programs running (i.e. a mail, DNS, or active web server is no good.) Remote (ssh) access to the machines would be most convenient for me, but if you’re in the New York City area, on-site access is OK, too. I can pay you in thanks, acknowledgement in the book, and a free copy or three of the book.

Tagged with writing