Load Testing Utilities

From KallestadWiki

Load testing a web server or a web site in particular is something important that needs to get done. Here are a few free utilities that you can use to get the job done. (There are many others not listed here)

1 ApacheBench (ab)
2 Jmeter
3 flood
4 siege
5 http_load
6 httpperf

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ApacheBench (ab)

Apache comes with a utility called ApacheBench that is located in the apache/bin directory. I don't know that you can install it all by itself, but you can certainly install apache locally just to get the binary.

ab -c <concurrent sessions> -n <number of visits> <url>

There are a lot more configuration options:

Usage: /usr/local/apache/bin/ab [options] [http[s]://]hostname[:port]/path
Options are:
   -n requests     Number of requests to perform
   -c concurrency  Number of multiple requests to make
   -t timelimit    Seconds to max. wait for responses
   -p postfile     File containing data to POST
   -T content-type Content-type header for POSTing
   -v verbosity    How much troubleshooting info to print
   -w              Print out results in HTML tables
   -i              Use HEAD instead of GET
   -x attributes   String to insert as table attributes
   -y attributes   String to insert as tr attributes
   -z attributes   String to insert as td or th attributes
   -C attribute    Add cookie, eg. 'Apache=1234. (repeatable)
   -H attribute    Add Arbitrary header line, eg. 'Accept-Encoding: gzip'
                   Inserted after all normal header lines. (repeatable)
   -A attribute    Add Basic WWW Authentication, the attributes
                   are a colon separated username and password.
   -P attribute    Add Basic Proxy Authentication, the attributes
                   are a colon separated username and password.
   -X proxy:port   Proxyserver and port number to use
   -V              Print version number and exit
   -k              Use HTTP KeepAlive feature
   -d              Do not show percentiles served table.
   -S              Do not show confidence estimators and warnings.
   -g filename     Output collected data to gnuplot format file.
   -e filename     Output CSV file with percentages served
   -h              Display usage information (this message)
   -Z ciphersuite  Specify SSL/TLS cipher suite (See openssl ciphers)
   -f protocol     Specify SSL/TLS protocol (SSL2, SSL3, TLS1, or ALL)

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Jmeter

There is also another load testing tool that apache puts out called jmeter. It is much more robust, and outputs graphs and nice logs, and even allows for analysis of the returned data, conditional activity based on returned data, etc. There are also some tips on how to use perl and excel to generate some better graphs.

You can also use BadBoy to generate test plans based on your own browsing activity. It's not perfect, but it's sort of free, and you can easily edit the test plans afterwards.

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