ApacheBench (also known as, ab) is,

a tool for benchmarking your Apache Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server

Don’t be fooled, you can use it to benchmark any server that supports HTTP. In fact, it might be worth checking out boom which is written in Go which makes it easier to use across platforms, and is simple to install (spoiler alert: it’s just a binary).

Anyhow, in this post I’ll demonstrate using ApacheBench (since I came across it first).

If you look at the documentation for ab you’ll see there a bunch of options. The focus of this post is the -p POST-file option which lets you POST a File containing data to POST.

Sounded simple, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I was trying to benchmark a form submission. I thought maybe I could use -p my-awesome-data.tgz, but it wasn’t quite that simple.

After some googling, I found that what I needed to do was submit a file that looked like a form based file upload. Turns out RFC1867 was the ticket. Here’s an example, check out the RFC for more details.

--1234567890
Content-Disposition: form-data; filename="my-awesome-data.tgz"
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary

<base64 data>
--1234567890

The boundary, 1234567890, should be a value guaranteed not to appear in the content of the request. The rest of the fields should be relatively simple to understand. The <base64 data> portion must contain the base64 encoded value of the file being uploaded.

Here’s how you’d run a benchmark that submits 100 requests, with 5 concurrent clients using a file named post.txt (which looks like the example shown above) to http://server.com/api/v1/data

ab -n 100 -c 5 -T 'multipart/form-data; boundary=1234567890' -p post.txt http://server.com/api/v1/data

I’d like to try out boom, but the concepts are similar so I suspect it should be just as easy.

Happy benchmarking!