[anonacct37]

> My initial requirement was to send requests with unique parameters. To the best of my knowledge, no tool could do this.

wrk does this with lua. https://github.com/wg/wrk/blob/master/src/wrk.lua

Also even things like the venerable jmeter supported pulling parameters from a csv file.

[nomilk]

I've never done load testing before, but would it be hard to write a script in pure ruby (maybe with a few libraries) that makes a lot of concurrent requests to whatever endpoints and using whatever params you like?

[hassy]

Don't write your own load testing tool other than as a fun little exercise. At least not without understanding coordinated omission and thinking about workload modeling (open? closed? hybrid? all of the above?) [1]. Get this wrong and the results produced by your tool will be worthless.

Once you've got that out of the way, don't forget that you'll want a distribution story. It does not matter how efficient your tool might be on a single machine - you'll want to distribute your tests across multiple clients for real-world testing.

"Sure it's easy" you might say, "I know UNIX. Give me pssh and a few VMs on EC2". Well, now you've got 2 problems: aggregating metrics from multiple hosts and merging them accurately (especially those pesky percentiles. Your tool IS reporting percentiles rather than averages already, right?!), and a developer experience problem - no one wants to wrangle infra just to run a load test, how are you going to make it easier?

And, this developer experience problem is much bigger than just sorting out infra... you'll probably want to send the metrics produced by your tool to external observability systems. So now you've got some plugins to write (along with a plugin API). The list goes on.

I'm very biased, but it's 2024. Don't waste your time and just use https://www.artillery.io/

1. https://www.artillery.io/blog/load-testing-workload-models

[plugin-baby]

> founder - artillery.io

[hassy]

> I'm very biased

[selykg]

I think mentioning you are a founder in the original comment might have prevented that particular reply from happening. I think one of the things I, personally, am becoming less okay with as a reader here is seeing recommendations without properly disclosing a connection.

Not saying everyone has nefarious reasons for doing it, but, it's just... everywhere.

I also play guitar, and there is a popular store in Europe with a pretty dang popular YouTube channel that I sometimes watch when the topic seems interesting. There was a whole kerfluffle a few months ago because one of the brand names that was getting a lot of air time on their YouTube channel was one that was financially backed by the owner of the store and a host of the channel. It took a ton of research of another YouTube to uncover this, and after it was found out, the owner of the store and host of the channel, finally disclosed his relationship with the brand he was promoting.

I feel like this was my more eye opening moment that tons of people out here on all variety of services are recommending their products but not disclosing their relationship clearly.

Now, you are saying so in your profile, but how many people are going to click into your profile?

I'm not saying you _have_ to do this, just suspecting that there are more and more people who are giving every recommendation the side eye these days because lack of disclosure. Disclosure isn't a bad thing, it just puts the bias in the open and people can gauge the recommendation more easily with that bias in mind.

None of this is probably new to you, but, trying to add something to the conversation rather than just call someone out, which is the easy and far more violent thing to do.

[anonacct37]

There's a lot of subtleties. It's really easy to accidentally load test the wrong part of your web application due to differences in compression, cache hit ratios, http settings, etc.

Shameless self promotion but I wrote up a bunch of these issues in a post describing all the mistakes I have made so you can learn from them: https://shane.ai/posts/load-testing-tips/

[hassy]

This is a great blog post! just taking the opportunity here to comment on this:

> Finally for full scale high fidelity load tests there are relatively few tools out there for browser based load testing.

It exists as of a few months ago and it's fully open source: https://github.com/artilleryio/artillery (I'm the lead dev). You write a Playwright script, then run it in your own AWS account on serverless Fargate and scale it out horizontally as you see fit. Artillery takes care of spinning up and down all of the infra. It will also automatically grab and report Core Web Vitals for you from all those browser sessions, and we just released support for tracing so you can dig into the details of each session if you want to (OpenTelemetry based so works with most vendors- Datadago APM, New Relic etc)

[toast0]

Load testing can be harder on the client side than the server side at high loads, which might be surprising, but consider how many servers need to handle large numbers of clients connecting and how few clients need to connect to large number of servers --- if you do it yourself, you're going to have to relearn all the techniques to make large number of connections possible.

If your desired load for testing is small, it's not a big deal, of course.

[paulryanrogers]

Depends on needs and familiarity. I used Bash and Curl, then PHP, then settled on Jmeter for a tricky bug due to a memory leak from a race under load. All three could reproduce the problem. Jmeter had quite a learning curve, and preparing data for it was a pain. Ultimately though it was more reliable, can do distributed testing, and has lots of nice built in features and analytics.

[vidarh]

It is simple enough to do a script doing that in Ruby, but there also enough off the shelf tools specifically for load testing that encodes a lot of experience and avoids a lot of obvious and not so obvious mistakes, so it's usually not worth writing your own.

[liveoneggs]

there is no reason to write your own