lib/nghttp2-1.65.0/doc/sources/h2load-howto.rst
.. program:: h2load
:doc:h2load.1 is benchmarking tool for HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1. It
supports SSL/TLS and clear text for all supported protocols.
h2load is compiled alongside nghttp2 and requires that the
--enable-app flag is passed to ./configure and required dependencies <https://github.com/nghttp2/nghttp2#requirements>_ are
available during compilation. For details on compiling, see nghttp2: Building from Git <https://github.com/nghttp2/nghttp2#building-from-git>_.
In order to set benchmark settings, specify following 3 options.
:option:-n
The number of total requests. Default: 1
:option:-c
The number of concurrent clients. Default: 1
:option:-m
The max concurrent streams to issue per client. Default: 1
For SSL/TLS connection, the protocol will be negotiated via ALPN. You
can set specific protocols in :option:--alpn-list option. For
cleartext connection, the default protocol is HTTP/2. To change the
protocol in cleartext connection, use :option:--no-tls-proto option.
For convenience, :option:--h1 option forces HTTP/1.1 for both
cleartext and SSL/TLS connections.
Here is a command-line to perform benchmark to URI \https://localhost using total 100000 requests, 100 concurrent clients and 10 max concurrent streams:
.. code-block:: text
$ h2load -n100000 -c100 -m10 https://localhost
The benchmarking result looks like this:
.. code-block:: text
finished in 7.08s, 141164.80 req/s, 555.33MB/s
requests: 1000000 total, 1000000 started, 1000000 done, 1000000 succeeded, 0 failed, 0 errored, 0 timeout
status codes: 1000000 2xx, 0 3xx, 0 4xx, 0 5xx
traffic: 4125025824 bytes total, 11023424 bytes headers (space savings 93.07%), 4096000000 bytes data
min max mean sd +/- sd
time for request: 15.31ms 146.85ms 69.78ms 9.26ms 92.43%
time for connect: 1.08ms 25.04ms 10.71ms 9.80ms 64.00%
time to 1st byte: 25.36ms 184.96ms 79.11ms 53.97ms 78.00%
req/s (client) : 1412.04 1447.84 1426.52 10.57 63.00%
See the h2load manual page :ref:h2load-1-output section for the
explanation of the above numbers.
As of v1.26.0, h2load supports timing-based load-testing. This method
performs load-testing in terms of a given duration instead of a
pre-defined number of requests. The new option :option:--duration
specifies how long the load-testing takes. For example,
--duration=10 makes h2load perform load-testing against a server
for 10 seconds. You can also specify a “warming-up” period with
:option:--warm-up-time. If :option:--duration is used,
:option:-n option is ignored.
The following command performs load-testing for 10 seconds after 5 seconds warming up period:
.. code-block:: text
$ h2load -c100 -m100 --duration=10 --warm-up-time=5 https://localhost
HTTP/2 has flow control and it may affect benchmarking results. By default, h2load uses large enough flow control window, which effectively disables flow control. To adjust receiver flow control window size, there are following options:
:option:-w
Sets the stream level initial window size to
(2**<N>)-1.
:option:-W
Sets the connection level initial window size to
(2**<N>)-1.
Sometimes benchmarking client itself becomes a bottleneck. To remedy
this situation, use :option:-t option to specify the number of native
thread to use.
:option:-t
The number of native threads. Default: 1
By default, if \http:// URI is given, HTTP/2 protocol is used. To
change the protocol to use for clear text, use :option:-p option.
If multiple URIs are specified, they are used in round robin manner.
.. note::
Please note that h2load uses scheme, host and port in the first URI
and ignores those parts in the rest of the URIs.
To request against UNIX domain socket, use :option:--base-uri, and
specify unix: followed by the path to UNIX domain socket. For
example, if UNIX domain socket is /tmp/nghttpx.sock, use
--base-uri=unix:/tmp/nghttpx.sock. h2load uses scheme, host and
port in the first URI in command-line or input file.
h2load supports HTTP/3 if it is built with HTTP/3 enabled. HTTP/3 support is experimental.
In order to send HTTP/3 request, specify h3 to
:option:--alpn-list.