Using Apache Bench for simple load testing

The following command runs 100 requests in total with 10 concurrent requests to example.com.

ab -n 100 -c 10 http://example.com/

Note! ApacheBench (ab) is installed on macOS by default.

Output will contain a lot of useful information. However firstly it’s worth paying attention to the following values:

• Requests per second
• Failed requests
• Time per request

The -H flag allows you to append extra headers to the request:

ab -n 100 -c 10 -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate" http://example.com/

The argument is typically in the form of a valid header line, containing a colon-separated field-value pair (ex., "Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate").

The -r flag means don’t exit if it gets an error:

ab -n 100 -c 10 -r http://example.com/

To make POST requests with a specific file used as the POST data, run the following command:

ab -n 100 -c 10 -p data.json -T application/json http://example.com/

The -T flag allows to specify the content type header like application/json. Default is text/plain.

Use watch to keep on firing ab requests at an endpoint. Notice that watch isn’t available by default on macOS, but can be easily installed with Homebrew:

brew install watch

and run

watch -n 1 ab -n 100 -c 10 http://example.com/