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load testing
Nov. 9th, 2016 10:53 amRecently needed to find Open Source load testing software. A couple of things surprised me. Most were written in interpreted languages or Java. Most were platform specific and only worked on Linux or sometimes POSIX systems. Since my preferences are cross-platform C/C++ programs, it was difficult to find load testing software to my liking. Here's a list of some load testing programs that looked useful.
openwebload (aka openload) - http://openwebload.sourceforge.net/
This was the only cross-platform C++ program in the group. The major limitation was that it didn't seem to handle load testing of secure web sites (URLs with https). It also hasn't been updated or maintained in a while, but that never deters me.
wrk - https://github.com/wg/wrk
This was the most interesting of the options I found. It's configurable using lua scripts. However, I was only able to get it to hit one page at a site. So, if you want to emulate things like logging in and navigating a site, that could be difficult. wrk uses code from nginx and other Open Source projects. There are some sample lua scripts, but documentation on how to write your own was rather sparse.
httperf - http://www.labs.hpe.com/research/linux/httperf/
This looked like a very useful tool, but I received web responses mainly in the 300s (3xx) range for the URLs I was testing.
autobench - http://www.xenoclast.org/autobench/
This is a Perl script that works with httperf. It can run httperf multiple times and increase the number of connections each time. It can also output a graph of the results. Since httperf was returning 3xx web responses for my tests, autobench did so as well.
curl-loader - http://curl-loader.sourceforge.net/doc/faq.html
This looked like a highly configurable program that could perform some interesting tests including navigating sites. However, it was very hard to set up even after reading through whatever documentation I could find. I actually froze the test machine where curl-loader was installed at one point and had to restart the machine.
Apache bench - https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/programs/ab.html
This is typically a part of an Apache installation but it can be used to load test other servers including nginx which was my target. Some articles said the technology used by this program was dated and that results might not provide a true picture. However, the program seemed to work fine for my test cases and didn't have an issue with secure URLs. The nice thing about it was that it was fairly simple to use compared to some of the other options.
It's also useful to have curl around when load testing. Once can check URLs with curl and see exactly what's being returned before using the URLs with the load test software.
openwebload (aka openload) - http://openwebload.sourceforge.net/
This was the only cross-platform C++ program in the group. The major limitation was that it didn't seem to handle load testing of secure web sites (URLs with https). It also hasn't been updated or maintained in a while, but that never deters me.
wrk - https://github.com/wg/wrk
This was the most interesting of the options I found. It's configurable using lua scripts. However, I was only able to get it to hit one page at a site. So, if you want to emulate things like logging in and navigating a site, that could be difficult. wrk uses code from nginx and other Open Source projects. There are some sample lua scripts, but documentation on how to write your own was rather sparse.
httperf - http://www.labs.hpe.com/research/linux/httperf/
This looked like a very useful tool, but I received web responses mainly in the 300s (3xx) range for the URLs I was testing.
autobench - http://www.xenoclast.org/autobench/
This is a Perl script that works with httperf. It can run httperf multiple times and increase the number of connections each time. It can also output a graph of the results. Since httperf was returning 3xx web responses for my tests, autobench did so as well.
curl-loader - http://curl-loader.sourceforge.net/doc/faq.html
This looked like a highly configurable program that could perform some interesting tests including navigating sites. However, it was very hard to set up even after reading through whatever documentation I could find. I actually froze the test machine where curl-loader was installed at one point and had to restart the machine.
Apache bench - https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/programs/ab.html
This is typically a part of an Apache installation but it can be used to load test other servers including nginx which was my target. Some articles said the technology used by this program was dated and that results might not provide a true picture. However, the program seemed to work fine for my test cases and didn't have an issue with secure URLs. The nice thing about it was that it was fairly simple to use compared to some of the other options.
It's also useful to have curl around when load testing. Once can check URLs with curl and see exactly what's being returned before using the URLs with the load test software.
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