hb

hb is an endpoint focused HTTP load testing / benchmark tool.

Description

The goal of hb is to provide a simple, robust tool to apply load against an endpoint (or set of endpoints). For example, it could replay load against a web-server, or evaluate the performance of REST APIs. It does not attempt to model workflows or user journeys.

It is similar to many other tools such as:

Features

hb supports the following features:

a large number (millions) of URLs (i.e. can test multiple endpoints or resources)
variable load concurrency (i.e. N worker threads)
variable request rate (N/unit of time) with optional distribution (uniform, constant, negative exponential)
reports latency based on percentiles
tracks the slowest N percentile of requests, and dumps a report after the run

Future features include:

ability to replay from a load-balancer log file at a time scaling multiple (link)
track delays due to coordinated omission (link)

Why?

Why another load testing tool? In my experience, while excellent, the above tools have various problems:

ApacheBench reports are extremely useful, but it has a limited feature set (e.g. only a single URL or request)
siege supports multiple requests (e.g. calls to various REST services behind an LB), but appears to crash with large volumes of URLs or concurrent requests
wrk has a good mix of features but suffers from coordinated omission
wrk2 is a fantastic improvement on wrk, but has limited load generation mechanisms such as negative exponential delays

A new tool also provides an opportunity to use a modern language (Rust) to support multiple platforms easily, whilst maintaining security, reliability and performance.

Getting Started

Building

At the moment the only platform supported is Linux. Future releases will include pre-built artifacts for MacOS and Windows.

Linux, static build, x86_64

This uses a Docker container to build a statically linked binary that can be run on any reasonable x86_64 environment.

alias rust-musl-builder='docker run --rm -it -v "$(pwd)":/home/rust/src ekidd/rust-musl-builder'
rust-musl-builder cargo build --release

Compiling locally

To compile it locally you'll need following dependencies

pkg-config
libssl-dev

On a clean Ubuntu 20.04 system, they can be installed by running

sudo apt install pkg-config libssl-dev

Running

Execute ./hb -h to view usage.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license.

Acknowledgments

My gratitude to my employer SEEK who provided time and hardware to build the initial version of this tool, and an environment where we can engage in interesting work and tackle cool problems.