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* htstress
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Fast HTTP Benchmarking Tool


About
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htstress is used for benchmarking HTTP services
on Linux. It's similar to Apache Benchmark (ab) 
but provides multithreading support which is 
essential in bechmarking highload services (>5K rps).

Build
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htstress does not require any libs. Just run 
./build.sh

Usage
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Arguments are similar to ab's:

-n total number of requests to make [OPTIONAL]
-c concurrency
-t threads number

If -n is missing, endless benchmark is started.
Use Ctrl-C to abort and see the result.

Set threads number equal to the number of
cores in your CPU for best results.

Comparison
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Here's the result of running htstress on 8-core 
machine benchmarking dummy NGINX page:

./htstress -n 10000 -c 100 -t 8 localhost:8087

0 requests
1000 requests
2000 requests
3000 requests
4000 requests
5000 requests
6000 requests
7000 requests
8000 requests
9000 requests

requests:      10000          <-- total #requests
good requests: 10000 [100%]   <-- #requests ended with 1xx, 2xx, 3xx codes
bad requests:  0 [0%]         <-- #requests ended with 4xx or 5xx code
seconds:       0.742
requests/sec:  13469.301      <-- rps - major benchmark result



Let's take a look what we have in single-threaded case.
Try ab first:

ab -n 10000 -c 100 http://localhost:8087/
This is ApacheBench, Version 1.3d <$Revision: 1.1.1.13 $> apache-1.3
Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright (c) 2006 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
...
Requests per second:    8554.32 [#/sec] (mean) <-- not much
...

Try htstress in single-threaded mode:

./htstress -n 10000 -c 100 -t 1 localhost:8087
...
requests/sec:  8679.237 <-- similar rps in single-threaded case


We have 8.5K rps in singlethreaded case 
vs 13K rps in multithreaded.

It's obvious single-threaded HTTP benchmarking is
not enough to test high-load event-based services. 
The benchmark tool itself eats 100% of a
single CPU core and cannot give a true result.

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(c) 2011 Roman Arutyunyan ([email protected])