fortio/fortio

Fortio is a load testing tool written in Go. Load testing means sending a controlled number of requests to a server and measuring how fast it responds. Fortio lets you specify exactly how many requests per second to send, then collects timing data and shows you statistics like the 99th percentile response time, which tells you how slow the worst 1 percent of responses were. It originally started as the load testing tool for the Istio project and was later released as a standalone tool in 2018. The tool is small (the Docker image is under 6 megabytes) and can be used in three ways: as a command-line tool, as a server with a browser-based interface, or as a library that other Go programs can include. The web interface lets you kick off test runs through a form, then see graphs of the results. A live demo is available at demo.fortio.org. Fortio supports testing both standard HTTP services and gRPC services (a different communication protocol commonly used between backend services). It also includes a set of built-in server behaviors for testing purposes: you can have it echo back requests, deliberately add random delays, return specific error codes at a given rate, or act as a proxy that fans requests out to multiple backends. This makes it useful both for testing real services and for setting up controlled test scenarios. Installation options include Docker, pre-built binaries for Windows, macOS, and Linux, a Homebrew package for macOS, Debian and RPM packages for Linux, and building from source. A scripting interface using a simplified Go-like language called grol is also available for writing more complex test sequences. The full README is longer than what was shown.