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I was just about to start looking into some http load testing tools, so I am glad to see this come up. Do people recommend this tool? What are some competitors? Can you produce enough load from your average laptop to effectively load test a web server?
I've used wrk[1] which is quite nice. My local macbook was able to completely saturate the service with ~20k req/sec.

1. https://github.com/wg/wrk

I've used both wrk and vegeta. wrk is a bit more flexible/mature, but vegeta has a somewhat nice interface and can be called as a library if you write go.

Both can be used to max out whatever your most limiting resource is.

I recommend Vegeta. It's super easy to configure and you can install it with a single binary. You can produce as much load as your Open File Descriptor limit, CPU/Memory, or Network pipe can handle using a single instance of this program.
However it seems like only h2 (HTTP/2 over TLS) is supported and not h2c (HTTP/2 over TCP with upgrade handshake) or HTTP/2 with prior knowledge.

It's a bit unfortunate that because of the decision of the browser vendors to support only HTTP/2 over TLS (for valid reasons) now a lot of libraries and tools support only that mode. For lots of other applications HTTP/2 without TLS would be helpful too.

How does the HTTP/2 implementation work?

Does it open a single TCP connection, then fire all load testing requests over that connection, or does it open multiple TCP connections and spread the load testing requests over multiple connections?

Author here. This is configurable with a combination of the -connections and -keepalive flags in the attack command.
can't get to the page.

is the load over 9000?

Unfortunately, Github was down for a bit. Back up!
your ref wasn't lost on me at least ;) Some trivia: that this was a mistranslation and in the original Japanese, it was "over 8000!"
It's not a mistranslation. Japanese tend to use "eight" to stand in for "a large number", but "nine" sounds cooler in English.
Ironically, I've heard one reason the word "fuck" shows up on Japanese products is that the shape of the letters is aesthetically pleasing.