Autocannon - JavaScript

Autocannon is a popular Node.js based load testing tool that can be used to measure the performance of APIs, web applications, or HTTP servers. It can generate high load and measure key performance metrics such as response time, throughput, and error rate. Autocannon is easy to use, scalable, and can generate load using multiple cores.

Getting Started

Autocannon can be installed via NPM:

npm install autocannon --save-dev

Once installed, you can start testing your application by running the following command:

autocannon -c 10 -d 10 http://localhost:3000

This command will start testing your application on http://localhost:3000 with 10 connections and for 10 seconds. Autocannon will generate the load and measure performance metrics.

Configuration

Autocannon provides several configuration options that you can use to fine-tune your tests. For example, you can set the number of connections, the duration of the test, the request rate, and the HTTP method of the requests. You can also provide a data file or a JSON request body for POST, PUT, or PATCH requests.

Here is an example configuration file that you can use:

{
    "url": "http://localhost:3000",
    "connections": 10,
    "duration": 10,
    "method": "POST",
    "requests": [
        {
            "path": "/api/users",
            "headers": {
                "Content-Type": "application/json"
            },
            "body": {
                "name": "John Doe",
                "email": "john.doe@example.com"
            }
        }
    ]
}

You can save this configuration file as config.json and run the following command:

autocannon -c config.json

This command will start testing your application based on the configuration provided in the config.json file.

Results

After running the tests, Autocannon will generate a summary report and an HTML report that you can use to analyze the performance of your application. The summary report includes metrics such as requests per second, latency, error rate, and so on.

Here is an example summary report generated by Autocannon:

Running 10s test @ http://localhost:3000
10 connections

Stat         Avg      Stdev    Max     
Latency (ms) 10.61    14.33    77.75   
Req/Sec      998.6    140.37   1733    
Bytes/Sec    601 kB/s 84.5 kB/s 1468 kB/s

Conclusion

Autocannon is a powerful and easy-to-use load testing tool that can help you measure the performance of your applications. By generating high load and measuring key performance metrics, Autocannon can help you identify bottlenecks and improve the scalability of your applications.