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Load test multiple API endpoints concurrently. Use this simple shell script

by Ivan Kvasnica, 26.10.2016 - Comment

I've been developing a new REST API used by tens of thousands of users recently.

In such cases, you need to ensure that the service remains available and high performant not only on your local environment, but also in production, used by, well, you know... tens of thousands of users.

Here are the options I had initially:

  1. Using one of the paid services for load testing. But I didn't want to spend any money on this task. Okay, there are several free options out there, but very limited in number of sent requests and other parameters.

  2. Just run a simple ab (Apache Benchmark) test.

Nohup to the rescue

I needed to find a compromise between these two solutions obviously. Free, but ideally with as many requests as I want, testing as many API endpoints as I need. All of that at the same time.

Therefore, I wrote a simple bash script that uses ab testing and the nohup Unix command. It loads all files with *.data extension in the current folder and send the content as POST data to your API server. By using nohup we tell the _ab _process to run in the background, even after the terminal is closed.

#!/bin/sh

SERVERPREFIX="http://your-rest-api.com/api/"
REQUESTNUMBER=500
MAXCONCURRENTREQUESTS=50

for datafile in *.data
do
    ENDPOINT="$SERVERPREFIX${ datafile%_*}"
    nohup ab -n $REQUESTNUMBER -c $MAXCONCURRENTREQUESTS -p "$datafile" -T application/x-www-form-urlencoded $ENDPOINT &
done

A *.data file consists of simple POST data you want to send to the API, for example:

new_password=secret&[email protected]

And how do you tell the script which endpoints to test?

Good question!

It just takes filenames of all the *.data files and append it to the URL of the API server. In other words, it tests as many endpoints as many files you have in the folder. You can send different data to the same endpoint as well, just add a version number to the filename.

Beware: version number are mandatory even if you have only one file per one endpoint!

Data file names can look like this:

  • pass-change_1.data
  • pass-change_2.data
  • create-user_1.data
  • etc.

Running the script

Save the above script as load-test.sh and run it in your terminal. You should see something like this:

$ bash load-test.sh
appending output to nohup.out
appending output to nohup.out
appending output to nohup.out
appending output to nohup.out

Now all the ab processes are running in background. You can check it by typing this:

$ ps

Once there are no _ab _processes running, you can check out the results. They're all in one file - nohup.out. A downside is that they're all separated per each API endpoint.

$ cat nohup.out

Do you want to stop all tests immediately, before finishing them? No problem.

$ pkill ab

This solution has many disadvantages and can be used only for simple testing. But at least it is more flexible and useful than just simply running _ab _commands in different terminal sessions.

If you have any ideas how to improve it, feel free to comment down below the article!