Slowhttptest

Installation

The tool is distributed as portable package, so just download the latest tarball from Downloads section, extract, configure, compile, and install:

$ tar -xzvf slowhttptest-x.x.tar.gz

$ cd slowhttptest-x.x

$ ./configure --prefix=PREFIX

$ make

$ sudo make install

Where PREFIX must be replaced with the absolute path where slowhttptest tool should be installed.

You need libssl-dev to be installed to successfully compile the tool. Most systems would have it.

Update: Apologies for FreeBSD users for failed build. Fix checked into svn. Use

svn checkout http://slowhttptest.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ slowhttptest-read-only

to build on FreeBSD, until we release new version.

Usage

Tool works out-of-the-box with default parameters, which are harmless and most likely will not cause a Denial of Service. Type

$ PREFIX/bin/slowhttptest

and test begins with the following default parameters:

test type	SLOW HEADERS
number of connections	50
URL	http://localhost/
verb	GET
interval between follow up data	10 seconds
connections per second	50
test duration	240 seconds
probe connection timeout	5 seconds
max length of followup data field	32 bytes

Every connection generates an initial request containing:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:80
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; SLCC2)

Where user-agent is being randomly picked from hard-coded list of user-agent strings, and remains the same for entire test.

Then, every 10 seconds a follow up header with random name and value each not greater than 32 bytes is being sent:

X-HMzV2bwpzQw9jU9fGjIJyZRknd7Sa54J: u6RrIoLRrte4QV92yojeewiuDa9BL2N7.
. 10 seconds.
X-nq0HRGnv1W: T5dSL.
. 10 seconds.
X-iFrjuN: PdR7Jcj27P
.
.

Repeated until server closes the connection or test hits time limit, 240 seconds in this case. There is a Probe socket, which connects every second and takes a probe of web server availability by sending complete GET request. If server responds within probe connection timeout interval (specified by -p argument), server is considered available, otherwise it's considered DoSed. Default value of 5 seconds might be not enough for slow servers, or if SSL connection is being used, so appropriate value should be around average response time of the server.

Full list of configurable options is the following:

-a start	start value of ranges-specifier for range header test
-b bytes	limit of range-specifier for range header test
-c number of connections	limited to 1024
-H, B, R or X	specify to slow down in headers section or in message body, -R enables range test, -X enables slow read test
-g	generate statistics in CSV and HTML formats, pattern is slow_xxx.csv/html, where xxx is the time and date
-i seconds	interval between follow up data in seconds, per connection
-k pipeline factor	number of times to repeat the request in the same connection for slow read test if server supports HTTP pipe-lining.
-l seconds	test duration in seconds
-n seconds	interval between read operations from receive buffer
-o file	custom output file path and/or name, effective if -g is specified
-p seconds	timeout to wait for HTTP response on probe connection, after which server is considered inaccessible
-r connections per second	connection rate
-s bytes	value of Content-Length header, if -B specified
-t verb	custom verb to use
-u URL	target URL, the same format you type in browser, e.g https://host[:port]/
-v level	verbosity level of log 0-4
-w bytes	start of range the advertised window size would be picked from
-x bytes	max length of follow up data
-y bytes	end of range the advertised window size would be picked from
-z bytes	bytes to read from receive buffer with single read() operation

Example of usage in slow message body mode:

./slowhttptest -c 1000 -B -g -o my_body_stats -i 110 -r 200 -s 8192 -t FAKEVERB -u https://myseceureserver/resources/loginform.html -x 10 -p 3

Example of usage in slowloris mode:

./slowhttptest -c 1000 -H -g -o my_header_stats -i 10 -r 200 -t GET -u https://myseceureserver/resources/index.html -x 24 -p 3

Output

Depends on verbosity level, output can be either as simple as heartbeat message generated every 5 seconds showing status of connections with verbosity level 1, or full traffic dump with verbosity level 4.

-g option would generate both CSV file and interactive HTML based on Google Chart Tools.

Here is a sample screenshot of generated HTML page

that contains graphically represented connections states and server availability intervals, and gives the picture on how particular server behaves under specific load within given time frame.

CSV file can be used as data source for your favorite chart building tool, like MS Excel, iWork Numbers, or Google Docs.

Copy from http://code.google.com/p/slowhttptest/