HTTP Loading Question

[Feighery, P. D. <fei...@mi...>]

I'm trying to determine how many HTTP transactions per second a particular device can support given one http transaction per each tcp connection.  Ideally I would like to generate 100 HTTP TPS every second for X seconds, then increase the load to 200 HTTP TPS every second for X seconds, etc.,  until I find the threshold.

Initially I took the brute force method and wrote a bunch of bash scripts around curl, and was able to successfully generate about 900 TPS.  Given my test setup, I believe my bottleneck was forking curl 900 times per second in a bash script.

So I found and downloaded and installed curl-load 0.52 and have been trying to understand how I can use it to replace my scripts.  Currently I'm using the lo interface to better understand how it works

I can't seem to configure curl-loader to match the above configuration

When I try the following
---
########### GENERAL SECTION ################################

BATCH_NAME= http
CLIENTS_NUM_MAX=12
CLIENTS_NUM_START=6
CLIENTS_RAMPUP_INC=2
INTERFACE   =lo
NETMASK=29
IP_ADDR_MIN= 10.200.001.1
IP_ADDR_MAX= 10.200.200.255  #Actually - this is for self-control
CYCLES_NUM=1
URLS_NUM=1

########### URL SECTION ####################################

URL=http://localhost/index.html
URL_SHORT_NAME="BB"
REQUEST_TYPE=GET
TIMER_URL_COMPLETION    = 5000

---

According to the logs
During the 0th second it generated 6 HTTP GET transactions
During the 1th second it generated 2 HTTP GET transactions
During the 2nd second it generated 2 HTTP GET transactions
During the 3rd second it generated 2 HTTP GET transactions

Is there a way for it to generated 6,8,10,12 transactions per second?

Also I want to repeat each loading for X seconds, which I thought I could do with CYCLES_NUM, however when I add CYCLES_NUM=2 I get the following
During the 0th second it generated 12 HTTP GET transactions
During the 1th second it generated 2 HTTP GET transactions
During the 2nd second it generated 2 HTTP GET transactions
During the 3rd second it generated 2 HTTP GET transactions

Where I would have preferred the following
During the 0th second I want it to generate  6 HTTP GET transactions
During the 1th second I want it to generate  6 HTTP GET transactions
During the 2nd second I want it to generate  8 HTTP GET transactions
During the 3rd second I want it to generate  8 HTTP GET transactions
During the 4th second I want it to generate  10 HTTP GET transactions
During the 5th second I want it to generate  10 HTTP GET transactions
During the 6th second I want it to generate  12 HTTP GET transactions
During the 7th second I want it to generate  12 HTTP GET transactions

>From reading the description of curl-loader it appears that this is possible,  can anyone help me with a correct config file.

Thanks

                Pat