Vegeta

Vegeta is a versatile HTTP load testing tool built out of need to drill HTTP services with a constant request rate. It can be used both as a command line utility and a library.

Install

You need go installed and GOBIN in your PATH. Once that is done, run the command:

$ go install github.com/tsenart/vegeta

Usage (CLI)

$ vegeta -h
Usage of vegeta:
  -duration=10s: Duration of the test
  -ordering="random": Attack ordering [sequential, random]
  -output="stdout": Reporter output file
  -rate=50: Requests per second
  -reporter="text": Reporter to use [text]
  -targets="targets.txt": Targets file

-duration

Specifies the amount of time to issue request to the targets. The internal concurrency structure's setup has this value as a variable. The actual run time of the test can be longer than specified due to the responses delay.

-ordering

Specifies the ordering of target attack. The default is random and it will randomly pick one of the targets per request without ever choosing that target again. The other option is sequential and it does what you would expect it to do.

-output

Specifies the output file to which the report will be written to. The default is stdout.

-rate

Specifies the requests per second rate to issue against the targets. The actual request rate can vary slightly due to things like garbage collection, but overall it should stay very close to the specified.

-reporter

Specifies the reporting type to display the results with. The default is the text report printed to stdout.

-reporter=text

Time(avg)	Requests	Success		Bytes(rx/tx)
152.341ms	200		    17.00%		251.00/0.00

Count:		49	30	39	48	34
Status:		500	404	409	503	200

Error Set:
Server Timeout
Page Not Found

-reporter=plot:timings

-targets

Specifies the attack targets in a line sepated file. The format should be as follows:

GET http://goku:9090/path/to/dragon?item=balls
HEAD http://goku:9090/path/to/success
...

Usage (Library)

package main

import (
  vegeta "github.com/tsenart/vegeta/lib"
  "time"
  "os"
)

func main() {
  targets := vegeta.NewTargets([]string{"GET http://localhost:9100/"})
  rate := uint64(100) // per second
  duration := 4 * time.Second
  reporter := vegeta.NewTextReporter()

  vegeta.Attack(targets, rate, duration, reporter)

  reporter.Report(os.Stdout)
}

Limitations

There will be an upper bound of the supported rate which varies on the machine being used. You could be CPU bound (unlikely), memory bound (more likely) or have system resource limits being reached which ought to be tuned for the process execution. The important limits for us are file descriptors and processes. On a UNIX system you can get and set the current soft-limit values for a user.

$ ulimit -n # file descriptors
2560
$ ulimit -u # processes / threads
709

Just pass a new number as the argument to change it.

TODO

Add timeout options to the requests
Graphical reporters
Cluster mode (to overcome single machine limits)
HTTPS

Licence

See the LICENSE file.

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