The SitePoint PHP blog has a tutorial posted that wants to help you test you application and get the best performance from it. The tutorial introduces you to Siege, a performance testing tool that includes benchmarking functionality.

Almost anyone can build an app locally, deploy it to a server, and proudly show it to your friends. I hope you’ve already done all of this, and your project went viral, so you’re obviously here because you want to learn how to make sure your app is ready for some high traffic.

[...] In this article, designed to speed this [learning] process up, I will cover the basic concepts of testing the app (regression, load, and stress testing) with Siege</a and some tips and tricks I like to use when I’m testing my own web apps.

The tutorial starts with an overview of the types of testing and a few tips for making your testing successful and effective. Then, using a sample Symfony demo application, they show how to make basic requests using Siege and what kind of data the results report. With the basics out of the way, they then cover more advanced topics like concurrency and doing the actual performance testing. Based on the results, they see that caching content could definitely help and, after enabling that, see the numbers go down dramatically. The post ends with a look at other testing tools and some of the things you'd need to plan out when using Siege against your application to get the most meaningful results.