Top 10 HTTP Benchmarking and Load Testing Tools

As a Developer and DevOps professional, the performance of your web applications is of high priority. To ensure that the users of your application do not experience glitches and to improve search engine ranking, you must optimize the performance of your application.

Load testing helps to understand the number of requests your application can handle optimally.

Web server benchmarking is the process of testing a web server's performance to determine how well it can cope with high workloads.

Benchmarking helps you understand which server, tech stacks, and configuration performs best for your application and gives you the benchmark performance when your application will become slow or break down.

The performance benchmark can be shown using various metrics such as the number of requests served within a specified period, the latency for each new connection/request, or the throughput.

To perform load testing and HTTP benchmarking for your application, you need to use tools designed for that purpose. We have highlighted 10 of the most efficient and widely used HTTP benchmarking and load testing tools in this article.

Wrk

If you want a widely used, modern, high performant, and open source benchmarking tool, wrk is your go-to solution.

wrk uses multi-threading, which allows it to leverage multi-core CPU to generate a high workload for testing HTTP connections.

It gives you the liberty to specify the number of HTTP connections, threads, duration, script, and latency for your benchmark.

It is adaptable for various applications and use cases including cryptographic software.

K6

K6 is a popular open source load testing tool written in Golang.

It supports HTTP, gRPC, and WebSocket and provides a flexible test metrics configuration that can be scripted with JavaScript.

It also provides integration with various platforms such as Gitlab, Datadog, Azure, and CircleCI.

You can use K6 on the cloud or install it locally by following the simple installation command for your operating system, provided in its GitHub repository.

Jmeter

Apache Jmeter is also one of the most popular tools for load testing.

It is an open source application for load testing and performance measurement. Jmeter is written in Java but supports HTTP(S) protocol for other tech stacks like Node.js, PHP, and ASP.NET.

In addition to the HTTP protocol, Jmeter also supports SOAP/REST web services, FTP, TCP, SMTP, and Java Objects.

Jmeter is a full-featured performance testing application used through the IDE or as a command-line utility.

Autocannon

Autocannon is a wrk-influenced HTTP benchmarking tool written in node.js. It supports HTTPS and HTTP pipelining and can be used programmatically through an API and as an independent command-line tool.

It can simulate thousands of requests per second and access Node.js worker threads, which makes it even faster than some other tools.

You can easily install it by running:

Autocannon offers various flexibilities that enable you to specify the number of connections, connection rate, requests, duration, port, maximum connection, timeout, and several other options.

Bombardier

Bombardier is a cross-platform HTTP(S) benchmarking tool written in Go programming language. It uses fasthttp, a Go HTTP implementation for fast and reliable HTTP performance execution.

You can install it by downloading the binaries from the GitHub repository or running;

SlowHTTPTest

SlowHTTPTest is a flexible and configurable open source testing tool. In contrast to other tools on this list, SlowHTTPTest simulates a Denial of Service (DoS) attack on your web server.

It executes the test by delaying HTTP connections to a server, thereby exposing vulnerabilities and the capacity of concurrent connections the server can run.

Tsung

Written in Erlang, Tsung is developed to simulate high workloads to test the scalability and performance of multiple protocols, including HTTP, SOAP, MySQL, and XMPP.

Tsung is an easy-to-use tool that can generate stately server workloads with high concurrency.

Drill

Drill is a lightweight HTTP load testing tool inspired by the Ansible Syntax. It is an open source tool written in Rust programming language

It is a command-line tool that allows you to specify various conditions, requests, and concurrency in a YAML file.

To install it, you can use cargo or run the following command

Cassowary

Cassowary is a Go-written cross-platform tool that enables you to test loads on HTTP servers in dual modes.

Cassowary can be installed using the pre-built binary from the official GitHub page or directly using Docker;

h2load

h2load is a benchmarking tool for HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 with support for SSL and TLS connections. It is a tool built by nghttp2, and it is compiled alongside nghttp2, specifying --enable-app flag and installing the required dependencies.

H2load allows you to specify various benchmark options, including the number of requests, number of concurrent clients, flow control, and multi-threading.

Below is a basic command to perform benchmark to https://localhost using 100 concurrent clients and a max of 9000 requests.