benchcurl

A simplistic REST wrapper around Apache Bench to test responsiveness of REST transactions over distance.

Benchcurl can respond to GET and PUT requests with dummy payloads, and it can generate a continuous stream of GET requests via Apache Bench.

Usage

As a single jar

$ git clone ...
$ lein uberjar
$ java -jar target/uberjar/benchcurl-0.3.0-standalone.jar

As a docker image

$ ./docker_build.sh
$ docker run -it --rm -p 443:443 gonewest818/benchcurl:0.3.0

Options

Benchcurl is configured using "defcon" which means options can be supplied either with environment variables or in a Java Properties file, whichever suits your needs. Any missing variables are filled in with defaults. Defcon tries to minimze surprises, and therefore any missing variables having no default value will cause an exception to be thrown at startup time.

The configurables are:

Name	Type	Default	Description
BENCHCURL_PORT	integer	8000	for unencrypted web traffic
BENCHCURL_MAX_THREADS	integer	8	this config goes directly to Jetty
BENCHCURL_SSL_PORT	integer	443	for encrypted web traffic
BENCHCURL_KEYSTORE	string	"benchcurl.jks"	local path to the keystore
BENCHCURL_KEY_PASSWORD	string	null	no default provided, must configure
BENCHCURL_NREPL_PORT	integer	-1	open an nrepl server port (unless < 0)

TLS encryption

In your environment you may already be handlng TLS in nginx, but Jetty supports TLS encryption with self-signed certs and we want to keep the deployment of benchcurl as simple as we can, so we're doing TLS directly in the app.

You're going to need the Java 'keytool' for this part. Here's the command line to generate a self-signed cert valid for 90 days:

$ keytool -genkey -keyalg RSA -alias selfsigned -keystore benchcurl.jks -validity 90 -keysize 2048
Enter keystore password:  
Re-enter new password: 
What is your first and last name?
  [Unknown]:  Administrator
What is the name of your organizational unit?
  [Unknown]:  Site Operations
What is the name of your organization?
  [Unknown]:  DWA Nova, LLC
What is the name of your City or Locality?
  [Unknown]:  Burbank
What is the name of your State or Province?
  [Unknown]:  CA
What is the two-letter country code for this unit?
  [Unknown]:  US
Is CN=Administrator, OU=Site Operations, O="DWA Nova, LLC", L=Burbank, ST=CA, C=US correct?
  [no]:  yes

Enter key password for <selfsigned>
    (RETURN if same as keystore password):

Here we've used "benchcurl.jks" as the keystore name but you can call it what you like as long as you supply the BENCHCURL_KEYSTORE as described in the options section above. Likewise, keep a record of the password you supply to keytool, because you're required to pass that in as the BENCHCURL_KEY_PASSWORD as well.

Examples

Retrieve a file of a specified size. The body you get back will be purely random, and the content type header will always be application/octet-stream. In typical usage you discard the body (because it doesn't matter) but read the timing in the output from curl.

$ curl -k -v https://example.com/file?size=1000000 -o /dev/null

Send a file. The body you send can be anything you like, and you should set the header to be "application/octet-stream." On the server side the body is discarded so again it doesn't really matter what bytes you send.

$ curl -k -X POST --data-binary @source-file \
       -H "Content-Type: application/octet-stream" \
       https://example.com/file

Benchmark another site. In this case the remote server invokes ApacheBench and points it at the server and port you specify.

$ curl -k https://example.com/benchcurl?size=1024&count=10&threads=5&server=remotesite.com&port=8000