The mention of load testing tools evokes images of archaic heavy weight license bearing tools like LoadRunner. You are fighting to find time slots for the load clients to run and target your application! yikes.
There are lighter weight and convenient tools that every programmer should add to his tool belt for performance testing and load simulation. You will find a listing of such tools below inspired by a question asked on slack by John Feminella.
A useful thing to note is whether your load generator is focused on generating requests or whether it tries to simulate users. The former is an “open queue” and the latter is a “closed queue”. For the “same” amount of traffic they will behave differently. see: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/Papers/nsdi_camera.pdf thanks Jacques Chester
Say you want to generate a lot of concurrent requests for demo purposes and want something robust and scriptable then these are the tools you should consider :
There are lighter weight and convenient tools that every programmer should add to his tool belt for performance testing and load simulation. You will find a listing of such tools below inspired by a question asked on slack by John Feminella.
A useful thing to note is whether your load generator is focused on generating requests or whether it tries to simulate users. The former is an “open queue” and the latter is a “closed queue”. For the “same” amount of traffic they will behave differently. see: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/Papers/nsdi_camera.pdf thanks Jacques Chester
Say you want to generate a lot of concurrent requests for demo purposes and want something robust and scriptable then these are the tools you should consider :
- Apache Bench (https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/programs/ab.html) Prevalent in all major unix and linux based distros and easiest to use. ab -k -c 100 -n 20000 abc.com/hello.html for 100 simultaneous connections emitting 20,000 requests each as fast as they can.
- Gatling (http://gatling.io/) Cloud based load testing. Load testing as code.
- Tsung (http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/). Tsung is a distributed load testing tool. It is protocol-independent and can currently be used to stress HTTP, WebDAV, SOAP, PostgreSQL, MySQL, AMQP, MQTT, LDAP and Jabber/XMPP servers. docs
- Hey (https://github.com/rakyll/hey) More heavy duty, Gatling and makes pretty ASCII graphs
- wrk & wrk2 (https://github.com/wg/wrk) HTTP benchmarking tool that generates significant load when run on a single multi-core CPU. Also see wrk2
- Siege (https://github.com/JoeDog/siege) Siege is an open source regression test and benchmark utility. It can stress test a single URL with a user defined number of simulated users, or it can read many URLs into memory and stress them simultaneously. siege -c255 -r1000 https://abc.com/greeter/hello
- Httperf The httperf HTTP load generator. httperf is a tool for measuring web server performance. It provides a flexible facility for generating various HTTP workloads and for measuring server performance.
- Hey: https://github.com/rakyll/hey HTTP load generator, ApacheBench (ab) replacement, formerly known as rakyll/boom. hey runs provide number of requests in the provided concurrency level and prints stats. It also supports HTTP2 endpoints.
