Testing Access speeds for forums

I was just wondering if there was a good way to test forum speeds
I've tried benchmark tests

ab -n 100 -c 100 ip
and strace -c nslookup www.domain.net

but both are very inconsistent, is there a good way of doing this, for example if you are doing lots of modifications to the server and want to test if access times are faster or quicker

maybe something like
SELECT BENCHMARK(1000000,10+10);

Is there a better way

 

 

 

 

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