For simple HTTP tests ab ( Apache Bench ) has been very useful. Unfortunately it has one may drawback today: no support for HTTP/2. For that, I recommend h2load, part of the nghtttp2 library.
On Ubuntu 18.04 you can get it as part of the nghttp2-client package, which uses version 1.30.0. For that, a simple sudo apt-get install nghttp2-client
will work. If you want to use a more recent release, it isn’t hard to build from source.
Here is a simple script for building nghttp2 with h2load:
Running a test based on number of requests, similar to how ab works, is simple:
Another option is to test for a length of time:
That runs a 10 second test, with a warm up period of 3 seconds.