Evaluating the SiteStory Transactional Web Archive with the ApacheBench Tool

Conventional Web archives are created by periodically crawling a Web site and archiving the responses from the Web server. Although easy to implement and commonly deployed, this form of archiving typically misses updates and may not be suitable for all preservation scenarios, for example a site that is required (perhaps for records compliance) to keep a copy of all pages it has served. In contrast, transactional archives work in conjunction with a Web server to record all content that has been served. Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed SiteStory, an open-source transactional archive written in Java that runs on Apache Web servers, provides a Memento compatible access interface, and WARC file export features. We used Apache’s ApacheBench utility on a pre-release version of SiteStory to measure response time and content delivery time in different environments. The performance tests were designed to determine the feasibility of SiteStory as a production-level solution for high fidelity automatic Web archiving. We found that SiteStory does not significantly affect content server performance when it is performing transactional archiving. Content server performance slows from 0.076 seconds to 0.086 seconds per Web page access when the content server is under load, and from 0.15 seconds to 0.21 seconds when the resource has many embedded and changing resources.