SYNOPSIS

hammerhead [ options ] [ resultsFile ]

DESCRIPTION

Hammerhead is a web site coverage and stress testing tool. It's also useful for benchmarking your web servers. It's been designed to emulate multiple users from multiple IP addresses and designed for maximum speed unlike it's interpreted counterparts. It's highly configurable and supports scenario based requests. The hammerhead command is sends HTTP requests to a nominated machine/port (as specified in the configFile) to simulate load on that port. It can be used to test the behaviour of the port under load, or the ability of the port to service a set of requests.

The behaviour of hammerhead is defined (almost) entirely by the configfile. See the description of this file below for an explanation of all of the configuration options.

hammerhead loads a set of requests from a number of files, each of which may contain a number of scenarios (one request per scenario). Scenarios may be linked into sequences, in order to simulate real users actions.

Once the scenarios are loaded, hammerhead starts up a number of threads and sends requests to the port. The expected result of a request may be specified in a scenario, and any result from the port which does not match with the expected result will be reported as an error. If no expected results are specified, then any result from the port will be accepted as valid. Specifying an expected result for any scenario has the effect of specifying the same result for all scenarios which have the same request.

Any failure to get a connection to the port, or any failure to receive a reply to a request will also be reported.

OPTIONS

The following options are supported:

-s or --seconds

Seconds to run tests for

-o or --outfile

Output result file

-t or --test

Test the scenarios in the conf file.

-C or --checkconf

Check config file

-c or --conffile

Config file path

-h or --help

Display help information

-v or --version

Output version

OPERANDS

The following operand is supported:

resultsFile:

Create an optimized scenario file to make hammerhead load faster.

CONFIGURATION FILE

The configuration file is a plain text file, containing a set of attribute/value pairs. Attribute names are matched without regard to case.

Any line in the file beginning with a hash (#) is treated as a comment, and ignored.

The attributes which may be defined in this file are:

Scenario_directory

The directory in which to find the Scenario file(s). All scenario files in this directory will be loaded. A scenario file is any file with the extension .scn (case sensitive). There may be more than one directive on a configuration file. Each directory shall be examined for scenario files.

default value: /var/tmp/scenarios/

Scenario_file

A specific file from which to read scenarios. There may be more than one directive on a configuration file.

Log_filename

The file in which all log messages will be written. If this file cannot be created, hammerhead will default to using standard error.

default value: /var/tmp/hammerhead/hh.log

Load_images

A flag indicating whether to automatically load images which are referenced in the result of a request.

posible values: on, off

default value: off

Sessions

The number of threads to start up.

default value: 1000

Seed

The random number seed used for the random selection of requests. Setting this number to any non-zero value will give deterministic behaviour (i.e. the same sequence of requests will be selected)

default value: 0

Sequence_probability

The percentage of the time that hammerhead will follow the sequence that the current request is in. Setting this to 100 will force hammerhead to follow any sequence it encounters to its completion.

default value: 75

Sleep_time

The amount of time (in milliseconds) to sleep between requests. In fact, this is the average sleep time, and hammerhead will sleep for a randomly selected period, between 0 milliseconds, and twice this value.

default value: 0

Run_time

The number of seconds to run each thread. If this value is 0, the threads run for-ever. This can be used to set up tests which run for a particular length of time.

default value: 0

Machine_IP

The IP number (and possibly port) of the machine/port to hammer. The format is <machine_number>[:<port_number>], where <machine_number> is as described in man inet_addr and <port_number> is optional.

This is the only attribute that must be defined in a configuration file

default value: no default for <machine_number>, 8080 for <port_number>

Ip_Alias

The outgoing IP numbers; allows Hammerhead to simulate multiple machines (upto 1 machine / session). May be any of the following forms: 10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.*, 10.0.*.*, 10.0.1-5.*, 10.0.0.1-5.

default value: the hammering machines normal IP address

Premature_Close

The percentage of requests that will be improperly terminated before sending/receiving is completed properly (to test problems such as FIN_WAIT1).

default value: 0

Bad_Request

The percentage of requests the will be scrambled requests (outside the properly defined scenarios).

default value: 0

Report_Time

The time interval upon which to written report summaries to the report log.

default value: 0 (report only once at test end.)

Report_Log

The log file which is to contain the report summaries.

default value: /var/tmp/report.log

Robot_ID

The robot id to be passed to the servers being hammered.

Currently not implemented.

Send_Cookie

Turn on to allow the sending of cookies with requests. Incoming cookies are buffered with each session when a Set-Cookie header is found. They're sent back with further requests to that session. Cookies are capped at 4K.

default value: off

Premature_Close

The percentage of connections which will close permaturely before the request reply has been fully read back from the server.

default value: 0

Log_Level

Log levels defined to work with the crawl functionality - somewhat mystical and not confirmed to be working.

default value: 0

Bandwidth_Limit

Turn on bandwidth limiting.

Not implemented yet.

Crawl

Crawl though the URLs contained in the reply to a request. Scope is somewhat unclear. Use with caution.

default value: off

SelectOn

When choosing a new sequence to commence, select from all the scenarios [ scenario ] or select from those scenarios which are at the beginning of a sequence of scenarios [ sequence ].

default value: scenario

Start_Lag

Start lag is a delay at thread startup before the first request is issued. The delay can be used to control the size of any startup spikes during the commencement of the test. The threads (processes) pause for a time between 0 and (Start_Lag * Sessions) milliseconds before issuing their first request.

default value: 1 millisecond

DNS_Server

Allow the specification of an alternate DNS server to use to resolve the machinenames. This resolution is completed once server DNS_TTL seconds.

default value: use the server nominated in /etc/resolv.conf

DNS_TTL

The Time To Live for the self cached DNS queries.

default value: 120 seconds

Machine_Name

The name of the machine/s to hammer. Names are resolved to addresses using the DNS resolver.

Use_SSL

Should SSL be used during each request?

default value: no

HTTP_Request_Type

Specify the HTTP request version, the default value is recommended as Hammerhead maybe not handle all 1.1 return packets correctly.

default value: HTTP/1.0

BottleNeck

Use connection bottlenecking to extend connecton holding time

Not implemented yet.

Max_Failures

The maximum number of request failures to be tolerated before we abandon the test. The value 0 means that hammerhead will never stop because of an excessive number of request failures.

default value: 0

SCENARIO FILE

A scenario file is a plain text file, containing a set of tagged value lines. The first character of each line is the tag, and the rest of the line is the value. Tags are matched case-sensitively.

Any line in the file beginning with a hash (#) is treated as a comment, and ignored.

The tag types which are legal in this file are:

N

The name of the scenario. A free-format string

default value: the name of the scenario file

D

Any dependencies to be met.

Unused at present.

R

The request to make. A valid HTTP request.

No default value. Scenarios without a Request are discarded.

H

A header (beyond the basic GET request).

No default value.

B

The body of a POST request

No default value.

E

Expected results. Note that hammerhead will strip off all HTTP header lines from the response (i.e. all lines up to the first blank line in the response).

No default value.

L

Expected Log result.

Not implemented yet.

S

Name of the next scenario in a sequence

No default value. A scenario without a S scenario specified is assumed to be the last in a sequence.

T

This option has 3 possible types of value: A number is the "think" (or wait) time in milliseconds. If a '+' proceeds the number then this specifies a fixed time from when Hammerhead begin to wait until (in milliseconds). If the 3rd special value '_exit' is given, then the thread running this scenario witll terminate after completing it.

default value: 0

X

The number of times this scenario may be cross-referenced by other scenarios (i.e. may be used in a sequence). A value of -1 is used to represent unlimited use, while 0 and positive numbers have the obvious meaning.

default value: -1

O

A number of options relating to a scenario are available. For example,

SSL = [ on|off ]

This option turns SSL on or off for this request, overriding the use of SSL in the configuration file.

PORT = [ port ]

This option allows for an alternative port number to be specificed for this scenario, overriding the port specified in the configuration file.

.

End of scenario definition.

RESULTS FILE

The results file contains a log of all requests. Each log line contains a time stamp, the process id of the session, the name of the scenario used, three times, the size of the response, the return code from the server and the server description.

The three recorded times are an offset from the initial start time, the time it took to get the first response from the server and the total time it took to get the complete response and process it. Typically these two times are similar, although network issues can cause the total time to be somewhat greater than the response time. Each time value is recorded in milliseconds.

EXAMPLES

Configuration File

# example configuration file - test.conf

# find all scenarios in this directory

Scenario_directory /u01/hammerhead/test1

# put all log messages in this file

Log_filename /u01/hammerhead/test1/test1.log

# Load all embedded images in each page returned by the port

Load_images on

# Simulate 50 users

Sessions 50

# Force all sequences to be completed

Sequence_probability 100

# Sleep 100ms between each request

Sleep_time 100

# Run the test for 10 minutes

Run_time 600

# Hammer goanna, on port 8080

10.456.789.012:8080

Scenario File

 # Example Scenario file - test.scn

 # Get the main page, then think for one second, then go to

 # the next scenario

 NTest Scenario 1

 RGET / HTTP/1.0

 STest Scenario 2

 T1000000

 E<html>

 E<head>

 E<title>Hammerhead - exploring Hammerland</title>

 E<link rev=made href="mailto:[email protected]">

 E</head>

 .

 # Get some random page, don't think, and go nowhere else

 # NOTE: . at end of scenario not required at end of file

 NTest Scenario 2

 RGET /coma HTTP/1.0

Usage

The following example:

example% hammerhead -c test.conf results.log

hammers the machine/port specified in the test.conf configuration file.

NOTES

The scenario file created by hammerhead when using the resultsFile operand is optimised to make it quicker for to load. All scenario names will be lost. Since hammerhead only ever reports errors in terms of the request being made, this is no great loss.

The results generated when using the resultsFile operand may contain non-printing characters which may corrupt terminal settings.