HTTP load testing with curl

It’s easy to use the curl command to load test a website. We’ll (ab)use the -K/--config option, to pass a configuration file like this:

silent = 1
output = "/dev/null"
write-out = "%{http_code} %{time_total}\n"
url = "http://dualbus.me/{,}{,}{,}{,,,,}{,,,,}{,,,,}"

The interesting part is the url. We’re requesting the same URL 1,000 times. (2x2x2x5x5x5). An easy way to compute that string:

dualbus@hp ~ % factor 1000
1000: 2 2 2 5 5 5

Now, you can use GNU xargs to do some requests in parallel (assuming you placed the configuration in config.txt):

printf '%.0sconfig.txt\n' {1..20} | xargs -P 20 -n 1 curl -K

Enjoy.

Updates

• Feb 15, 2015: This answer from Ian Purton shows a different way of doing it (with ranges instead of alternations), so you can do: curl 'http://domain.name/#[1-100]'.