boom 0.5

Simple HTTP Load tester

Boom! is a simple command line tool to send some load to a web app.

Boom! is a script you can use to quickly smoke-test your web app deployment. If you need a more complex tool, I’d suggest looking at Funkload.

Boom! was specifically written to replace my Apache Bench usage, because I was annoyed by some bugs and some stupid behaviors.

And it was so simple to write it, thanks to Gevent.

I have no special ambitions for this tool, and since I have not found any tool like this in the Python-land, I wrote this one.

There are a lot of other tools out there, like Siege which seems very popular.

However, Boom! is a good choice because it works on any platform and is able to simulate thousands of users by using greenlets.

Installation

Boom! requires Gevent and Requests. If you are under Windows I strongly recommend installing Gevent with the xxx-win32-py2.7.exe installer you will find at: https://github.com/SiteSupport/gevent/downloads

Boom! should work with the latest 1.x version or the latest 0.x version.

If you are under Linux, installing the source version is usually a better idea. You will need libevent for Gevent 0.x and libev for Gevent 1.x.

Example under Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install libevent python-dev

Then:

$ pip install boom

Basic usage

Basic usage example: 10 queries with a maximum concurrency of 10 users:

$ boom http://localhost:80 -c 10 -n 10
Server Software: nginx/1.2.2
Running 10 times per 10 workers.
Starting the load [===================================] Done

-------- Results --------
Successful calls        100
Total time              0.3260 s
Average                 0.0192 s
Fastest                 0.0094 s
Slowest                 0.0285 s
Amplitude               0.0191 s
RPS                     306
BSI                     Pretty good

-------- Legend --------
RPS: Request Per Second
BSI: Boom Speed Index

Boom! has more options:

$ boom --help
usage: boom [-h] [--version] [-m {GET,POST,DELETE,PUT,HEAD,OPTIONS}]
            [--content-type CONTENT_TYPE] [-D DATA] [-c CONCURRENCY] [-a AUTH]
            [-n REQUESTS | -d DURATION]
            [url]

Simple HTTP Load runner.

positional arguments:
url                   URL to hit

optional arguments:
-h, --help            show this help message and exit
--version             Displays version and exits.
-m {GET,POST,DELETE,PUT,HEAD,OPTIONS}, --method {GET,POST,DELETE,PUT,HEAD,OPTIONS}
                        Concurrency
--content-type CONTENT_TYPE
                        Content-Type
-D DATA, --data DATA  Data
-c CONCURRENCY, --concurrency CONCURRENCY
                        Concurrency
-a AUTH, --auth AUTH  Basic authentication user:password
-n REQUESTS, --requests REQUESTS
                        Number of requests
-d DURATION, --duration DURATION
                        Duration in seconds
-H HEADER, --header HEADER
                        Custom header. name:value

Design

Boom uses greenlets through Gevent to create virtual users, and uses Requests to do the queries.

Using greenlets allows Boom to spawn large amounts of virtual users with very little resources. It’s not a problem to spawn 1000 users and hammer a web application with them.

I plan to add more things like allowing people to provide a callable for the -D option.

If you are interested in this project, you are welcome to join the fun at https://github.com/tarekziade/boom