Java bench - Simple and lightweight service load testing tool

At WSO2, we use various types of tools and programmatic approaches to load, stress and performance test SOA middleware products. Out of them, one particular tool is part of almost all engineers workspaces. It is Java bench (or java-ab).

Java bench is the java clone of the popular ApacheBench load generator customized for better HTTP1.1 support.

Java bench is a very simple and easy to use utility. One of the greatest advantages of using it for performance testing is, its lesser overhead on load generation machines. Most of the load generators consist of rich UIs and reporting utilities hence the load generator it self consumes considerable amount of CPU and memory when you run performance testing in single server. It is always not practical to run load generators in separate machines. Sometimes we need to run load/performance tests against a server running on a local machine in order to provide quick feedback about the product under test or reproduce perf/memory issues. In these situations, Java-bench is the ideal solution.

Lets see how we can run a basic performance test using java bench.

Pre-requisites:

Linux or windows OS

jdk1.5 or higher

Step 1

Download Java bench from here and extract the downloaded zip file.

Step 2

Go to the root of the extracted directory and run 'java -jar benchmark.jar' to see the available options.

usage: HttpBenchmark [options] [http://]hostname[:port]/path

-v Set verbosity level - 4 and above prints response

content, 3 and above prints information on headers, 2 and above prints

response codes (404, 200, etc.), 1 and above prints warnings and info.

-H

Add arbitrary header line, eg. 'Accept-Encoding:

gzip' inserted after all normal header lines. (repeatable)

-n Number of requests to perform for the benchmarking

session. The default is to just perform a single request which usually

leads to non-representative benchmarking results.

-T Content-type header to use for POST data.

-c Concurrency while performing the benchmarking

session. The default is to just use a single thread/client.

-h Display usage information.

-i Do HEAD requests instead of GET.

-k Enable the HTTP KeepAlive feature, i.e., perform

multiple requests within one HTTP session. Default is no KeepAlive

-p File containing data to POST.

Step 3

We will run a load test against one of the publicly available web services. I use a simple web servicehosted in xmethods which generates a list of prime numbers that are less than a specified max value.

First you need to invoke this service using SOAPUI or some other client and capture the SOAP request message. Then save it as a xml in your file system.

Sample request:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:web="http://microsoft.com/webservices/">

<soapenv:Header/>

<soapenv:Body>

<web:GetPrimeNumbers>

<web:max>56 </web:max>

</web:GetPrimeNumbers>

</soapenv:Body>

</soapenv:Envelope>

Step 4

Now, we can use java bench to send series of requests to the above web service as follows.

java -jar benchmark.jar -p SoapRequest.xml -n 100 -c 10 -k -H "SOAPAction: http://microsoft.com/webservices/GetPrimeNumbers" -T "text/xml; charset=UTF-8" http://www50.brinkster.com/vbfacileinpt/np.asmx

As you can see, we specify the soap request xml with -p parameter. -c specifies the no.of concurrent threads/clients used in the test. -n is used to specify the no.of requests transmitted per a keep-alive connection. In our example, each client carries 100 requests therefore 1000 total requests will be sent to the service. -k enables HTTP keep-alive so that multiple requests share the same HTTP session. -H is used to specify the HTTP headers. In our example, SOAPAction HTTP header is appended to the message. You can find the relevant SOAPAction from the WSDL of the service. -T is used to specify the Content-Type header of the request. The last parameter is the endpoint of target service.

After the test is completed, you will see the result as shown below.

Server Software: Microsoft-IIS/6.0

Server Hostname: www50.brinkster.com

Server Port: 80

Document Path: http://www50.brinkster.com/vbfacileinpt/np.asmx

Document Length: 429 bytes

Concurrency Level: 10

Time taken for tests: 59.378401 seconds

Complete requests: 1000

Failed requests: 0

Write errors: 0

Total transferred: 756000 bytes

Requests per second: 16.84 [#/sec] (mean)

Time per request: 593.784 [ms] (mean)

Time per request: 59.378 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

Transfer rate: 7.22 [Kbytes/sec] received

5.51 kb/s sent

12.73 kb/s total

Simple. Isn't it? We will look in to more interesting tests with java-bench in future posts.