k6 – modern load-testing tool

k6 is a modern load testing tool for developers and testers in the DevOps era.

It’s built to be powerful, extensible, and full-featured. k6 allows you to prevent performance issues and proactively improve reliability. It helps engineering teams prevent errors and SLO breaches, enabling them to build resilient and high-performing applications that scale.

This is free and open source software.

Features include:

• Load and performance testing – optimized for minimal resource consumption and designed for running high-load performance tests such as spike, stress, or soak tests.
• Browser performance testing – run browser-based performance tests and collect browser metrics to identify performance issues related to browsers.
• Performance and synthetic monitoring – schedule tests to run with minimal load very frequently, continuously validating the performance and availability of your production environment.
• Chaos and resilience testing – use k6 to simulate traffic as part of your chaos experiments, trigger them from your k6 tests or inject different types of faults in Kubernetes with xk6-disruptor.
• Configurable load generation. Even lower-end machines can simulate lots of traffic.
• Tests as code. Reuse scripts, modularize logic, version control, and integrate tests with your CI.
• A full-featured API. The scripting API is packed with features that help you simulate real application traffic.
• An embedded JavaScript engine. The performance of Go, the scripting familiarity of JavaScript.
  Multiple Protocol support. HTTP, WebSockets, gRPC, Browser, and more.
• Large extension ecosystem. k6 extensions lets you create custom k6 binaries to support your specific reliability-testing needs:
  • JavaScript extensions extend the JavaScript APIs available to your test scripts. Add support for new network protocols, improve performance compared to equivalent JS libraries, or add features.
  • Output extensions send metrics to a custom file format or service. Add custom processing and dispatching.
• Flexible metrics storage and visualization. Summary statistics or granular metrics, exported to the service of your choice.
• Native integration with Grafana cloud. SaaS solution for test execution, metrics correlation, data analysis, and more.

Website: github.com/grafana/k6
Support:
Developer: Grafana Labs
License: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0

k6 is written in Go. Learn Go with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

Return to Web Server Performance Testing Tools

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