webmaster is the program that manages the execution of a WebStone benchmark run. It uses rexec(3N) to invoke a webclient(1) process on each of the client load-generating systems to be used for the benchmark.
When the benchmark run is done, webmaster polls the webclient processes for the data they've collected, summarizes the data, and writes it to standard output.
For example, if the client system's IP address is 168.10.2.14, the netmask has the default value (255.255.255.0), and webserver is 25, webmaster tells the client system's webclient to use 168.10.2.25 for its Web server.
webmaster is the program that manages a single measurement run of the WebStone benchmark. It parses all the configuration information for the run, opens a socket to communicate with the client systems that will generate load on the server, and calls rexec() to start webclient on each client system.
At the end of the run webmaster polls the webclient processes to receive their results. It then summarizes the results and writes them to the standard output stream.
Web Server There are a number of ways to specify the Web server to be tested:
If a proxy server is to be tested, each URL in the list must be a full URL that specifies the server name.
Test Load There are a number of ways to specify the list of URLs that webmaster is to provide to its webclient slaves:
Unless the "-U URL_list" option is used, webmaster provides the list of URLs to webclient over the master socket. webclient then parses the URL list and returns the number of entries to webmaster on the same socket.
See webclient(1) for a detailed description of load generation.
webmaster writes its output to its standard output stream.
Other files used by webmaster are specified on the command line. If no URL files are specified on the command line, webmaster tries to read the list of URLs from its standard input stream.
During a test run webmaster keeps a socket open to each webclient process. Make sure that the number of file descriptors available to webmaster is greater than the total number of webclient processes to be run. The "-R" and "-s" flags also each cause one file per webclient process to be opened on the client system.
File for load URL lists:
For each URL to be used to generate the test load, the URL list has an entry with the following form. Comments and blank lines in the list are ignored. Each comment starts with a hash character ('#') and continues to the end of the line.
webmaster does not use any environment variables.
WebStone was created by Silicon Graphics, Inc. Version 2.5 and later were developed by Mindcraft, Inc.
The command line options are too complicated. webmaster should usually be run by scripts.