Why doesn't Apache Bench work on google.com? - http

Question

$ curl -s -D - https://www.google.com/ -o /dev/null
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2015 05:33:13 GMT
Expires: -1
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151657 for more info."
Server: gws
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=1111111111111111:FF=0:TM=1446096793:LM=1446096793:V=1:S=LVeGIvKogvfq6VHi; expires=Thu, 31-Dec-2015 16:02:17 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com
Set-Cookie: NID=72=sAIx-8ox3_AVxn6ymUjBsKzSmAXLwjNRTcV4Cj9ob1YmLkFc-lSJKvRK1kNdn1lIGruh-wH1_vctiRzKSFTG7IkJHSrVY_At_QbacsYgiI_8EOpMLe2cRIxXINj27DVpgnijGx7tKT1TCDirrunO3Bu0D4DVXz3lB0f42ZyJqOCtOJX2hprvbOOc8P8; expires=Fri, 29-Apr-2016 05:33:13 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com; HttpOnly
Alternate-Protocol: 443:quic,p=1
Alt-Svc: quic="www.google.com:443"; p="1"; ma=600,quic=":443"; p="1"; ma=600
Accept-Ranges: none
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
but Apache Bench has errors for all but one request:
$ ab -n 5 https://www.google.com/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1528965 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking www.google.com (be patient).....done
Server Software: gws
Server Hostname: www.google.com
Server Port: 443
SSL/TLS Protocol: TLSv1.2,ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256,2048,128
Document Path: /
Document Length: 18922 bytes
Concurrency Level: 1
Time taken for tests: 1.773 seconds
Complete requests: 5
Failed requests: 4
(Connect: 0, Receive: 0, Length: 4, Exceptions: 0)
Total transferred: 99378 bytes
HTML transferred: 94606 bytes
Requests per second: 2.82 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 354.578 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 354.578 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 54.74 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 158 179 40.8 162 252
Processing: 132 176 79.0 148 316
Waiting: 81 118 80.5 83 262
Total: 292 354 119.5 310 567
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 299
66% 321
75% 321
80% 567
90% 567
95% 567
98% 567
99% 567
100% 567 (longest request)
Why does ab have errors?

Answer 1

Add a -l to the command
It tells Apache Bench to not expect constant length for every response.
This should work:
ab -l -n 5 https://www.google.com/
Output:
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1807734 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking www.google.com (be patient).....done
Server Software: gws
Server Hostname: www.google.com
Server Port: 443
SSL/TLS Protocol: TLSv1.2,ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305,256,256
TLS Server Name: www.google.com
Document Path: /
Document Length: Variable
Concurrency Level: 1
Time taken for tests: 0.433 seconds
Complete requests: 5
Failed requests: 0
Total transferred: 67064 bytes
HTML transferred: 62879 bytes
Requests per second: 11.55 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 86.588 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 86.588 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 151.27 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 20 20 1.0 20 22
Processing: 63 66 2.7 67 69
Waiting: 62 65 2.8 66 68
Total: 83 86 3.3 87 91
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 85
66% 89
75% 89
80% 91
90% 91
95% 91
98% 91
99% 91
100% 91 (longest request)

Answer 2

AB has categorized these as length errors because it expects the responses to be of the same length. Google probably has some kind of dynamic content being returned on their homepage.
Load Testing with AB ... fake failed requests (length)