Vegeta HTTP Load Testing

Vegeta is a free and open-source command-line HTTP load testing tool written in Go, designed for stress-testing HTTP services with constant request rates. Created by Tomas Senart in 2014, Vegeta is one of the most popular load testing tools in the Go ecosystem, known for its simplicity, speed, and detailed reporting. Key features: constant rate load testing: Vegeta sends HTTP requests at a constant, configurable rate (requests per second) for a specified duration. This allows developers to measure service performance under sustained load, identify bottlenecks, and determine maximum throughput. Target specification: attack targets are defined in JSON format, specifying the HTTP method, URL, headers, and body. Multiple targets can be defined in a targets file for testing multiple endpoints. Customization: supports custom HTTP methods, headers, request bodies, and dynamically generated request data. HTTP/2 support. Keep-alive connections. Configurable timeouts. Attack options: rate (requests per second), duration (total test time), max-connections, workers, and connections per host. Results and metrics: collects detailed metrics including latency, status codes, bytes in/out, and errors. Aggregate metrics include latency percentiles (p50, p90, p95, p99, max), success rate, requests per second, and throughput. Reporting: results can be output in text, JSON, or histogram format. The vegeta plot command generates an HTML plot (time-series latency graph). The vegeta report command produces formatted text or JSON reports. Encoding: results can be encoded in gob format for efficient storage and later processing. Library API: Vegeta can be used as a Go library for custom load testing scenarios. Go. MIT.