h2load - HTTP/2 benchmarking tool - HOW-TO¶

Basic Usage¶

In order to set benchmark settings, specify following 3 options.

-n

The number of total requests. Default: 1

-c

The number of concurrent clients. Default: 1

-m

The max concurrent streams to issue per client. If auto is given, the number of given URIs is used. Default: auto

Here is a command-line to perform benchmark to URI https://localhost using total 100000 requests, 100 concurrent clients and 10 max concurrent streams:

$ h2load -n100000 -c100 -m10 https://localhost

The benchmarking result looks like this:

finished in 0 sec, 385 millisec and 851 microsec, 2591 req/s, 1689 kbytes/s
requests: 1000 total, 1000 started, 1000 done, 1000 succeeded, 0 failed, 0 errored
status codes: 1000 2xx, 0 3xx, 0 4xx, 0 5xx
traffic: 667500 bytes total, 28700 bytes headers, 612000 bytes data

The number of failed is the number of requests returned with non 2xx status. The number of error is the number of failed plus the number of requests which failed with connection error.

The number of total in traffic is the received application data. If SSL/TLS is used, this number is calculated after decryption. The number of headers is the sum of payload size of response HEADERS (or SYN_REPLY for SPDY). This number comes before decompressing header block. The number of data is the sum of response body.

Flow Control¶

HTTP/2 and SPDY/3 or later employ flow control and it may affect benchmarking results. To adjust receiver flow control window size, there is following options:

-w

Sets the stream level initial window size to (2**<N>)-1. For SPDY, 2**<N> is used instead.

-W

Sets the connection level initial window size to (2**<N>)-1. For SPDY, if <N> is strictly less than 16, this option is ignored. Otherwise 2**<N> is used for SPDY.

Multi-Threading¶

Sometimes benchmarking client itself becomes a bottleneck. To remedy this situation, use -t option to specify the number of native thread to use.

-t

The number of native threads. Default: 1

Selecting protocol for clear text¶

By default, if http:// URI is given, HTTP/2 protocol is used. To change the protocol to use for clear text, use -p option.

Multiple URIs¶

If multiple URIs are specified, they are used in round robin manner.