[krallin]

Locust is really focused on load tests (rather than acceptance tests). It's an alternative to ab rather than one to a headless browser.

You definitely wouldn't use Locust to test a UI, or even to test your API responds correctly, but you'd use it to know how many requests per second that API can serve without falling over.

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Two key differentiators (advantages?) Locust has over ab are:

+ It's scriptable, so you can design complex interactions like described in the blog post (or even something as simple as logging in prior to hitting the app).

+ It supports clustering. It's easy to setup a multi-host Locust cluster, and results are aggregated to your locust master.

I don't have an affiliation with Locust, but I did find it extremely easy to setup and use when I needed it (for HTTP load tests with ~20K RPS).

I do recall a few scale issues (e.g. running out of client ports would break the clustering), but with a bit of fine-tuning, it runs like a charm.