Features
curl-loader is capable of simulating application behavior of hundreds of thousands of HTTP/HTTPS and FTP/FTPS clients, each with its own source IP-address. In contrast to other tools, curl-loader uses real client protocol stacks, namely, HTTP and FTP stacks of libcurl and TLS/SSL of openSSL, and simulates user behavior with support for login and authentication flavors.
It can run up to 2,500–100,000 and more virtual loading clients from a single curl-loader process. The actual number of virtual clients may be several times higher, limited mainly by memory availability. Each virtual client loads traffic from its "personal" source IP-address, or from the "common" IP-address shared by all clients, or from IP-addresses shared by some clients where a limited set of shared IP-addresses can be used by a batch of clients.
According to the project's SourceForge repository, the most recent stable release is version 0.56, which was published on 10 January 2012.Curl-loader is a C program for sending load to a server using the following protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and FTPS. It is a load-testing tool for Linux and is based on the curl library. Uses libcurl for HTTP/ftp protocols and OpenSSL for TLS/ssl..
Major features:
- Rampup of the virtual clients number at loading start in either automatic or manual mode;
- IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and URIs;
- HTTP 1.1. GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, HEAD including file upload operations;
- HTTP user authentication login with POST or GET+POST methods. Unique configurable username and password for each virtual client as well as configurable posted string (post-forms) are the options. Another option is loading of users with credentials from a tokens text file;
- HTTP POST/GET forms with up to 16 tokens filled from a tokens text file;
- HTTP user logoff with POST, GET+POST, or GET (cookies); POST logoff with configurable posted string (post-forms);
- HTTP multipart form data POST-ing as in RFC1867;
- HTTP Web and Proxy Authentication (HTTP 401 and 407 responses) with Basic, Digest (RFC2617) and NTLM;
- HTTP 3xx redirections with unlimited number of redirections;
- HTTP cookies and DNS caches;
- FTP passive and active, FTP upload;
- Full customization of client request HTTP/FTP headers;
- Transfer limit rate for each client download or upload operation on a per url bases;
- URL fetching probability;
- TCP connections reuse or re-establishment on a per URL bases;
- Unlimited configurable number of URLs. Mixing of HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and FTPS urls in a single batch (test plan) configuration;
- Connection establishment timers for each URL;
- URL completion timers monitoring and enforcement for each client;
- Inter/after URL "sleeping" timers, including random timers taken from a configurable interval;
- Logfile with tracing activities for each virtual client;
- Logging of responses (headers and bodies) to files;
- Pre-cooked batch configuration (test plan) examples;
- Load Status at console and with output to file;
- Status and statistics for each virtual client which are logged to file;
The goal of curl-loader is to deliver an open-source software performance testing client-side solution as an alternative to Spirent Avalanche and IXIA IxLoad. Curl-loader is normally paired with nginx or Apache web server as the server-side.
