A Powerful HTTP / HTTPS / FTP / FTPS Load and Performance testing open-source tool - curl-loader

curl-loader is an open-source tool written in C-language, simulating application load and application behavior of thousands and tens of thousand HTTP / HTTPS and FTP / FTPS clients, each with its own source IP-address. In contrast to other tools curl-loader is using real C-written 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.

The goal of curl-loader is to deliver a powerful and flexible open-source testing solution

curl-loader is useful for performance loading of various application services, for testing web and ftp servers and traffic generation. Activities of each curl-loader virtual client are logged and collected statistics includes information about resolving, connection establishment, sending of requests, receiving responses, headers and data received/sent, errors from network, TLS/SSL and application (HTTP, FTP) level events and errors.

curl-loader virtual clients are grouped together to so-called batches of clients, performing the same sort of activities, like:
  * authentication login;
  * user activity simulation by fetching several URLs with configurable timeouts in between;
  * logoff.

curl-loader can be easily extended to generate sftp, telnet, tftp, ldap, ssh, scp etc other application protocols, supported by the great libcurl library.

curl-loader Installation:

First download the curl-loader package from here. Open up the terminal Application > Accessories > Terminal and type following command to compile and install curl-loader under Ubuntu:

tar zxfv curl-loader-<version>.tar.gz
cd curl-loader-<version>
sudo make
sudo make install

Using curl-loader:

To run curl-loader you need a configuration file to be passed to curl-loader by the -f commmand line option, e.g.

curl-loader -f ./conf-examples/bulk.conf

For more examples, please, look at the files in "conf-examples" directory. You may copy an example file and edit it as per your requirement.

Look at the man pages for curl-loader and curl-loader-config for more details.