github.com/pinterest/bender (go): Package bender makes it easy to build load testing applications for services using protocols like HTTP, Thrift, Protocol Buffers and many others.  Bender provides two different approaches to load testing. The first, LoadTestThroughput, gives the tester control over the throughput (QPS), but not over the concurrency (number of goroutines). The second, LoadTestConcurrency, gives the tester control over the concurrency, but not over the throughput.  LoadTestThroughput simulates the load caused by concurrent clients sending requests to a service. It can be used to simulate a target throughput (QPS) and to measure the request latency and error rate at that throughput. The load tester will keep spawning goroutines to send requests, even if the service is sending errors or hanging, making this a good way to test the actual behavior of the service under heavy load. This is the same approach used by Twitter's Iago library, and is nearly always the right place to start when load testing services exposed (directly or indirectly) to the Internet.  LoadTestConcurrency simulates a fixed number of clients, each of which sends a request, waits for a response and then repeats. The downside to this approach is that increased latency from the service results in decreased throughput from the load tester, as the simulated clients are all waiting for responses. That makes this a poor way to test services, as real-world traffic doesn't behave this way. The best use for this function is to test services that need to handle a lot of concurrent connections, and for which you need to simulate many connections to test resource limits, latency and other metrics. This approach is used by load testers like the Grinder and JMeter, and has been critiqued well by Gil Tene in his talk "How Not To Measure Latency".  The next two sections provide more detail on the implementations of LoadTestThroughput and LoadTestConcurrency. The following sections provide descriptions for the common arguments to the load testing functions, and how they work, including the interval generators, request generators, request executors and event recorders.  The LoadTestThroughput function takes four arguments. The first is a function that generates nanosecond intervals which are used as request arrival times. The second is a channel of requests. The third is a function that knows how to send a request and validate the response. The inner loop of LoadTestThroughput looks like this:  The fourth argument to LoadTestThroughput is a channel which is used to output events. There are events for the start and end of the load test, the sending of each request and the receiving of each response and the wait time between sending requests. The wait message includes an "overage" time which is useful for monitoring the health of the load test program and underlying OS and host. The overage time measures the difference between the expected wait time (the interval time) and the actual wait time. On a heavily loaded host, or when there are long GC pauses, that difference can be large. Bender attempts to compensate for the overage by reducing the subsequent wait times, but under heavy load, the overage will continue to increase until it cannot be compensated for. At that point the wait events will report a monotonically increasing overage which means the load test isn't keeping up with the desired throughput.  A load test ends when the request channel is closed and all remaining requests in the channel have been executed.  The LoadTestConcurrency function takes four arguments. The first is a semaphore that controls the maximum number of concurrently executing requests, and makes it possible to dynamically control that number over the lifetime of the load test. The second, third and fourth arguments are identical to those for LoadTestThroughput. The inner loop of LoadTestConcurrency does something like this:  Reducing the semaphore count will reduce the number of running connections as existing connections complete, so there can be some lag between calling workerSem.Wait(n) and the number of running connections actually decreasing by n. The worker semaphore does not protect you from reducing the number of workers below zero, which will cause undefined behavior from the load tester.  As with LoadTestThroughput, the load test ends when the request channel is closed and all remaining requests have been executed.  An IntervalGenerator is a function that takes the current Unix epoch time (in nanoseconds) and returns a non-negative time (also in nanoseconds) until the next request should be sent. Bender provides functions to create interval generators for uniform and exponential distributions, each of which takes the target throughput (requests per second) and returns an IntervalGenerator. Neither of the included generators makes use of the function argument, but it is there for cases in which the simulated intervals are time dependent (you want to simulate the daily traffice variation of a web site, for example).  The request channel decouples creation of requests from execution of requests and allows them to run concurrently. A typical approach to creating a request channel is code like this:  Requests can be generated randomly, read from files (like access logs) or generated any other way you like. The important part is that the request generation be done in a separate goroutine that communicates with the load tester via a channel. In addition, the channel must be closed to indicate that the load test is done.  The requests channel should almost certainly be buffered, unless you can generate requests much faster than they are sent (and not just on average). The easiest way to miss your target throughput with LoadTestThroughput is to be blocked waiting for requests to be generated, particularly when testing a large throughput.  A request executor is a function that takes the current Unix Epoch time (in nanoseconds) and a *Request, sends the request to the service, waits for the response, optionally validates it and returns an error or nil. This function is timed by the load tester, so it should do as little else as possible, and everything it does will be added to the reported service latency. Here, for example, is a very simple request executor for HTTP requests:  The http package in Bender provides a function that generates executors that make use of the http packages Transport and Client classes and provide an easy way to validate the body of the http request.  RequestExecutors are called concurrently from multiple goroutines, and must be concurrency-safe.  The LoadTestThroughput and LoadTestConcurrency functions both take a channel of events (represented as interface{}) as a parameter. This channel is used to output events as they happen during the load test, including the following events:  StartEvent: sent once at the start of the load test.  EndEvent: sent once at the end of the load test, no more events are sent after this.  WaitEvent: sent only for LoadTestThroughput, see below for details.  StartRequestEvent: sent before a request is sent to the service, includes the request and the event time. Note that the event time is not the same as the start time for the request for stupid performance reasons. If you need to know the actual start time, see the EndRequestEvent.  EndRequestEvent: sent after a request has finished, includes the response, the actual start and end times for the request and any error returned by the RequestExecutor.  The WaitEvent includes the time until the next request is sent (in nanoseconds) and an "overage" time. When the inner loop sleeps, it subtracts the total time slept from the time it intended to sleep, and adds that to the overage. The overage, therefore, is a good proxy for how overloaded the load testing host is. If it grows over time, that means the load test is falling behind, and can't start enough goroutines to run all the requests it needs to. In that case you will need a more powerful load testing host, or need to distribute the load test across more hosts.  The event channel doesn't need to be buffered, but it may help if you find that Bender isn't sending as much throughput as you expect. In general, this depends a lot on how quickly you are consuming events from the channel, and how quickly the load tester is running. It is a good practice to proactively buffer this channel.
Keywords: dns|http|load-testing|thrift