Load Testing using Hey

I was trying to benchmark a service that I was building using Apache AB and running into some issues with it (Damn you AB for not supporting HTTP/1.1). I looked up alternatives to AB, and found hey. It's written in Golang and is pretty nifty.

In this post, I will walk you through a setup of golang and hey on your instance and a simple benchmark. Hey requires a Go version of 1.7 and above, and this makes the setup process look time consuming since the yum repo installs Go 1.6, and any Google search to install Go 1.7 will be met with a collection of wget, tar, export and make. Fortunately, there's gvm, which simplifies things for us.

Installing Go1.7 and Hey

1. Run bash < <(curl -s -S -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/moovweb/gvm/master/binscripts/gvm-installer)
   This installs GVM.

2. Install Go1.4 and make it default. This is needed because some parts of Go 1.5 and above are bootstrapped, so Go 1.7 needs an existing version of Go to install itself. (If the install step fails, try with --binary as indicated here.
   gvm install go1.4
gvm use go1.4

3. Run gvm install go1.7

4. Switch to the version required by hey gvm use go1.7

5. Check if you have GOPATH configured using echo $GOPATH

6. Install hey. go get -u github.com/rakyll/hey to install hey

7. Confirm installation which hey

Et voilà . We have installed hey.

A simple benchmark

hey -n 10 -c 2 -m POST -T "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" -d 'username=1&message=hello' http://your-rest-url/resource

This opens 2 connections, and sends 10 requests. Each request is a form post with 2 parameters to your resource. Tweak the command to add/remove more flags as you need it.