HTTP & Load Testing

The HTTP & Load Testing group gathers the two clients that send an HTTP request and examine the response, and the two load generators that measure performance by sending intensive requests to a target. The questions "What does the health address of the backend return?", "Does the vService give the correct response for the correct host name?", "How many requests per second does this vService serve, and with what latency?" are the job of this group.

curl

An HTTP request; the headers, the status code, the redirects, the TLS detail.

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wget

A simple HTTP request; printing the content to the screen.

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h1load

HTTP/1 load generation; a request and latency report second by second.

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wrk

Multi-threaded load generation; the total request rate and the latency distribution.

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Which Command When?

Question	Command	Example
Which status code does the health address of the backend return?	curl	sys-cmd curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}' http://10.20.0.30/health
Which response does the vService give for a specific host name?	curl	sys-cmd curl -I -H "Host: shop.example.com" http://10.0.7.20/
Seeing the content of the page quickly on the screen	wget · curl	sys-cmd wget -qO- http://10.20.0.30/version
How does the vService behave under a specific load?	wrk	sys-cmd wrk -t2 -c50 -d30s http://10.0.7.20/
How does the latency change second by second under load?	h1load	sys-cmd h1load -c 20 -d 30 http://10.0.7.20/

Load tests affect real traffic

h1load and wrk send real requests to the target. Applying load with high concurrency to a live vService can slow down real users and can trigger the WAF and rate limiting rules. It is started with a low connection count and a short duration, and production targets are not tested outside a maintenance window.

Common Behavior

Subject	Behavior
Writing	All four are tools with free parameters: everything written after the command name is passed to the tool as it is. Addresses that contain & or $ are written with single quotation marks.
Context	The requests are sent from within the selected v-device and route table.
File	The files created with the tool's own file writing parameters (curl -o, wget -O <name>) do not land in the temporary file area; if the content is to be kept, it is printed to the screen and saved with | to-file <name>.
Recording	Every run is written to the user logs.

All of the writing rules and the restrictions: System Commands.