ApacheBench is one of the most common programs used to benchmark web servers.
By default apachebench will run using HTTP/1.0 requests and without compression enabled even if the tested server supports that.

For example:

ab -n 1 -v 4 “http://www.ducea.com/”
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.41-dev <$Revision: 1.141 $> apache-2.0
Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright (c) 1998-2002 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking www.ducea.com (be patient)…
INFO: POST header ==
—
GET / HTTP/1.0
User-Agent: ApacheBench/2.0.41-dev
Host: www.ducea.com
Accept: */*
—
LOG: header received:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 21:55:53 GMT
Server: Apache
Status: 200 OK
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

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Here you can find various tips & tricks for configuring and administrating Apache that I found to be useful. Once I will add a new tip, I’ll link it here so you can use this page as a main placeholder for all the tips I will post in the future. Each tip will consist in a very short description, what is it used for, where can you apply it (globally, per directory or per virtual hosts, if it can be activated without administrative privileges in .htaccess) and of course a how to implement it. I will try to keep each tip as short as possible and on a single topic so you can go directly to what you are looking for. Read the rest of this entry »

While working on a project on mod_deflate, I have stumbled across this great link that allows you to test remotely any server if it has enabled compression (mod_gzip/mod_deflate) and also see some statistics on the bandwidth saved on the particular URL tested (this is achieved by making one request without gzip enabled and another one with gzip enabled).
I found it very handy while testing various things…

http://www.whatsmyip.org/mod_gzip_test/

http://www.ducea.com is gzipped

Original Size: 43 K
Gzipped Size: 10 K
Data Savings: 76.74%