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How to Generate Millions of HTTP Requests (2012)

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Re: How to Generate Millions of HTTP Requests (2012)

#3
post #2

There are plenty of different HTTP benchmarking applications for Unix OS' but I still have not found a good one for Windows. Anybody come across one?

I am under the impression that it's possible to compile Wrk for Windows [1], although I have not personally done so.

Incidentally, I've not read the linked article, but skimmed the first few paragraphs. The numbers of requests per second that he was able to generate with various tools seem remarkably low. ApacheBench is the least performant load generator since it's only single-threaded, but it can generate tens of thousands (about 25,000) requests per second on a i7 desktop machine. Wrk can generate significantly more since it uses all CPU cores of the load-generation machine.

[1] https://github.com/wg/wrk/issues/49

Re: How to Generate Millions of HTTP Requests (2012)

#5
post #4

Another tool I have been using on my personal project is wrk [1]. It's pretty simple to use and can generate thousands of connections with multiple threads. [1]: https://github.com/wg/wrk

There's a branch from Gil Tene (Azul) that fixes wrk for the coordinated omission problem, which he explains in the readme of that same repo[1].

[1] https://github.com/giltene/wrk2

Re: How to Generate Millions of HTTP Requests (2012)

#6
post #2

There are plenty of different HTTP benchmarking applications for Unix OS' but I still have not found a good one for Windows. Anybody come across one?

Check out Gatling[1], which is based on Scala, Akka, and Netty, and last time I checked works on Windows.

The only thing missing would be an out-of-box solution for distributed load generation, which I believe is being developed. But today, you can use a 'scale-out' approach[2] which gives you the ability to combine the data from multiple Gatling instances into a single report, but as a post-process step.

[1] http://gatling.io [2] http://gatling.io/docs/2.1.5/cookbook/scaling_out.html

Re: How to Generate Millions of HTTP Requests (2012)

#8
post #7

See also Siege ( https://www.joedog.org/siege-home/ )

I've been a fan of siege, but recently I had to test an app under very high load and I had big trouble getting siege to do that. The default ubuntu install has some hard limits on file pointers and compiling it from source seemed to segfault all the time. I ended up switching over to httperf.

Re: How to Generate Millions of HTTP Requests (2012)

#10
post #7

See also Siege ( https://www.joedog.org/siege-home/ )

I used Siege a few years ago for some benchmarking and was not impressed. It's a pity because I really like the interface, but Siege is technically lacking.

There is a warning in the configuration file against using keep-alive with no explanation as to why. That makes it useless when you need to benchmark persistent connections.

Each Siege "user" (i.e. client) has it's own thread, which means they consume a large number of resources. Depending on your CPU, you will also hit a point where more time is spent switching between threads than actually sending requests. I wasn't able to exceed 400 users on my 2011 test machine. That makes it useless when you need to benchmark large numbers of connections.

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