Siege: test the performance of your web servers

I used siege to test the performances of our web servers. I run it on a management server located in DMZ, so as avoid bandwidth and latency limits. I configured siege to run 50 parallel request at time, each one repeated 600 times (30000 total HTTP requests).

This is .siegerc I used to run the tests:

verbose = false
show-logfile = true
logging = truel
ogfile = ${HOME}/siege.log
protocol = HTTP/1.1
chunked = true
connection = close
concurrent = 50
reps = 600
file = ${HOME}/url.txt
delay = 0
internet = false
benchmark = true

The first test have been run sending requests to the virtual IP owned by the balancer that forwards them to the real servers server1 and server2 according to a weighted round-robin algorithm. In the second test requests have been sent directly to server1 having the document-root stored locally. The last test have been run sending requests to server2 that mounts the document root via NFS from server1.

Crap! As usual when doing tests I cannot get the facts. It gave slightly better results on server2 than on server1. Investigating...