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I am looking for a tool to test a website from a Linux command line.

From the output, I need to know the http response (status codes) but also benchmark the time it takes to download the different elements of the site.

Thank you in advance.

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What have you found, looked at, or are considering (suitable / not suitable) so far? – mctylr Mar 22 '10 at 16:04

7 Answers

up vote 5 down vote

You can try wget with -p option:

wget -p http://site.com

It will tell you how long it takes to download each element and the return codes for each request.

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up vote 4 down vote

Please see Apache Benchmark:

Apache Benchmark

This should give you an overview of your page's performance.

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Apache benckmark cannot be use for this since it is an external source, in fact it is youtube video playlist. We are monitoring the access to this ressource. TY – Embreau Mar 22 '10 at 14:42
I don't see why you can't use ab; like wget in the next answer, it will work as long as the URL of your site is accessible from the machine where you're runinng the benchmarking tool. – gareth_bowles Mar 22 '10 at 14:46
Apache benchmark is not restricted to local resources, it's meant to be a full performance measuring tool (including network latency, i/o, etc). – andre Mar 22 '10 at 14:52
Good to know, I will evaluate this option, thank you. – Embreau Mar 22 '10 at 16:31
up vote 4 down vote

You may want to look at the following options of curl:

  • --write-out - displays any of several time-related variables
  • --trace-time - Prepends a time stamp to each trace or verbose line
  • --verbose
  • --include - (HTTP) Include the HTTP-header in the output.
  • --trace-ascii <file> - Enables a full trace dump of all incoming and outgoing data, including descriptive information

And the following option of wget:

  • --timestamping - Turn on time-stamping
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curl --trace-ascii <file> --trace-time -o /dev/null <url> was exactly what I needed. Thanks! – dsummersl May 17 at 14:21
up vote 1 down vote

use curl to get the header for the page, and time the process

time curl -I http://yourpage.com | grep HTTP

wrap that in a while loop and you're good to go, the same way you can check for all elements if you know the URL

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up vote 0 down vote

If you are going to need something bigger then curl and/or wget, there is also selenium

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up vote 0 down vote

Selenium and Curl are good options depending on what your goal is. Also, a utility that I've come to like quite a bit is twill. More information is available at http://twill.idyll.org/.

It's nice as it has it's own little specialized language for filling out forms, validating links, and checking response codes. Since it's just Python code, you can easily import the libraries and automate your tests yourself if you'd like to do something different.

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up vote 0 down vote

I think for running performance test you can try JMeter. You can record your test using the built in proxy. It also runs in text mode, local or distributed. You can save your results in csv or xml format. If using xml format you can also store the content of the page.

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