The State of Load Testing according to us

"Once upon a time, I wrote a very simple command-line load testing tool in C. I called it "myload", partly because it was written by, well...myself, and partly as an allusion to MySQL (this was back in the days when MySQL ruled and I had yet to start using PostgreSQL)", says Ragnar Lönn, the founder of Load Impact.

Reinventing the wheel gets better the second (and third) time you do it

After a while of using myload, however, we got tired of its limitations and our CTO, Robin Gustafsson, wrote the next-generation tool compatible with myload, but which also introduced a real scripting language (Lua). This tool was given the internal name "rload" (where the "r" could mean "our", instead of the previous "my". Less possessive, more socialist-like. Of course, "r" could also stand for "Robin").

So we have never released either myload (scary thought) or rload (slightly less scary) to the general public, but only used them in the loadimpact.com online service, but when we sat down and discussed what should come next, after rload, we decided it was time for a different approach.

At Load Impact we had for a long time been discussing the next step after we retired rload. Should we go for one of the available tools out there? Earlier we were contemplating using Jmeter, but it always felt like it would be a step backward. Most tools were too simple and lacked any kind of functionality to run logic in your test scenario.

We started work on our new tool k6 in 2016 and released it publicly in 2017. The aim is to provide a high-quality load testing tool for developers and automated load testing.

k6 is free and open source software, available on Github. It is written in Go, which provides speed and good concurrency support on multiple platforms. It integrates the Goja Javascript engine and supports ES6 through BabelJS.

k6 still has some way to go to become the perfect tool for developers doing automated load testing, but we believe it is much better than anything else currently available, both free and commercial options included.

If you want to read the full story, you will find it here