tcpkali is a high performance TCP and WebSocket load generator and sink.

• Efficient multi-core operation (--workers); utilizes all available cores by default.
• Allows opening massive number of connections (--connections)
• Allows limiting an upstream and downstream of a single connection throughput (--channel-bandwidth-downstream, --channel-bandwidth-upstream or --message-rate)
• Allows specifying the first and subsequent messages (--message, --first-message).
• Measures response latency percentiles using HdrHistogram (--latency-marker)
• Sends stats to StatsD/DataDog (--statsd)

tcpkali -em "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: google.com\r\n\r\n" -r 10 --latency-marker "HTTP/1.1" google.com:80

Install the following packages first:

• autoconf
• automake
• libtool
• bison
• flex
• gcc-c++

test -f configure || autoreconf -iv
./configure
make
sudo make install

Usage: tcpkali [OPTIONS] [-l <port>] [<host:port>...]

You can get the full list of options using tcpkali --help, from man tcpkali, and by consulting the tcpkali man page source.

Connect to a local web server and do nothing:

tcpkali 127.0.0.1:80

Connect to a local echo server and hammer it with stream of dollars:

tcpkali --message '$' localhost:echo
tcpkali -m '$' localhost:echo

Open 10000 connections to two remote servers:

tcpkali --connections 10000 yahoo.com:80 google.com:80
tcpkali -c 10k yahoo.com:80 google.com:80

Open 100 connections to itself and do nothing:

tcpkali --connections 100 --listen-port 12345 127.0.0.1:12345
tcpkali -c100 -l12345 127.1:12345

Open a connection to itself and send lots of cookies:

tcpkali --listen-port 12345 --message "cookies" 127.0.0.1:12345
tcpkali -l 12345 -m "cookies" 127.1:12345

Listen for incoming connections and throw away data for 3 hours:

tcpkali --listen-port 12345 --duration 3h
tcpkali -l12345 -T3h

Open connection to the local WebSocket server, send hello, and wait:

tcpkali --websocket --first-message "hello" 127.0.0.1:80

Open connection to the local server and send tons of empty JSON frames:

tcpkali --websocket --message "{}" 127.1:80

Open connection to the local server and send a JSON frame every second:

tcpkali --ws -m "{}" -r1 127.1:80