Wideload was designed to meet the requirements of load testing a real-time API, whose consumers impose a strict request time policy of 100ms, after which they disconnect an HTTP keep-alive connection and reconnect. None of the existing load generation tools could enforce the behavior of such clients, so wideload was born.

Specifically, wideload is different from alternatives because it:

1. Uses HTTP keep-alive by default
2. Enforces a hard limit on request time, after which the attempt is marked as a failure, and the connection dropped
3. Can make GET or POST requests (with a fairly large request body, up to about 1MB)

And like many other alternatives in that it:

1. Allows configurable concurrency
2. Logs comprehensive request timing information for the full suite to CSV

However, wideload does not:

1. Infer any semantics from the order of URLs being tested, nor make any guarantees that they will be tested in the order listed (i.e. it is not a "functional" test tool)
2. Carry state from one request to the next (such as HTTP cookies)

Widelaod is simple to use from the command-line:

$ wideload --run-seconds 30 --concurrency 50 path/to/urls.txt

This will run 50 threads concurrently for 30 seconds each, where each thread will request each of the URLs in the file path/to/urls.txt as many times as it can until the time runs out.

The URLs file is a YAML list of URLs and metadata, like:

- get: http://my.server.com/url1
- get: http://my.server.com/url2
- post: http://my.server.com/url2
  payload: paramOne=valueOne&paramTwo=valueTwo
  headers:
  - Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

For POST requests with binary payloads (that is, payloads which contain characters that would confuse the YAML parser, like newlines), you can use the payload64 key with a base64-encoded value:

- post: http://my.server.com/url2
  # This is the base64 representation of the same payload as above
  payload64: cGFyYW1PbmU9dmFsdWVPbmUmcGFyYW1Ud289dmFsdWVUd28=
  headers:
  - Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Note that the Content-Type header is still set to application/x-www-form-urlencoded, since the (decoded) payload is of that content type.

Wideload is issued under the BSD license (see attached LICENSE file). It uses several third party libraries which are distributed under their own licenses, and includes libb64 which is placed in the public domain by its authors.