[Owasp-dirbuster] Performance HOWTO

[Andres Riancho]

James,

    Hi! How are you? I hope you are well.

    During last week I've been trying to enhance the performance of
w3af, and particularly the performance of the HTTP requests. After
some thinking on how to achieve high speeds, I remembered that
DirBuster does an AWESOME job at this, so I wanted to ask you some
questions related to the way you used to measure the performance of
your tool:

- Have you used any specialized tools? Which?
- Do you perform only HEAD requests?
- Do you have the test server (apache?) running on localhost?
- When running on localhost, in which section are you having the bottleneck?
- When running on a network... is the network link the bottleneck?
- For your tests, do you fine tune with a single thread, and then
simply run different threads?
- I've read somewhere that threads are evil, and that you should avoid
them when they compete for a scarce resource like network. What do you
think about this?
- How long do you run each test? 1, 2, 5 minutes?
- How confident are you about the results you get from your
tools/testing methodology?

    I'm sorry if this seems an interrogatory, but if you are as
passionate as I am about this... I think you'll rather enjoy this
thread =)

Cheers,
-- 
Andres Riancho
http://w3af.sourceforge.net/
Web Application Attack and Audit Framework