Bug#541158: apache2-utils: 'ab -n requests' is broken

[Peter Sankauskas <smarthost@motally.com>]

Package: apache2-utils
Version: 2.2.9-10+lenny4
Severity: important

The man page for 'ab' states the following:

 -n requests
        Number  of  requests  to  perform  for the benchmarking session. The
        default is to just perform a single request which usually  leads  to
        non-representative benchmarking results.

Several tests have confirmed that this is not true. It would seem, -n 
allows you to specify the number of responses 'ab' receives before it 
stops sending requests. For -c 1, ab conforms with the above statement. 
But for -c > 1, in practice, ab sends about half the number of -c 
more requests than it should. Examples:
    ab -c 16 -n 1000
    # of request sent
    1008
    
    ab -c 100 -n 100000
    # of request sent
    100048

I see two solutions to this problem. The preferred one is to modify 
'ab' to only send the desired number of requests. The other is to change 
the documentation.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0.2
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.21.7-2.fc8xen (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages apache2-utils depends on:
ii  libapr1             1.2.12-5             The Apache Portable Runtime Librar
ii  libaprutil1         1.2.12+dfsg-8+lenny3 The Apache Portable Runtime Utilit
ii  libc6               2.7-18               GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libssl0.9.8         0.9.8g-15+lenny1     SSL shared libraries

apache2-utils recommends no packages.

apache2-utils suggests no packages.

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