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Introducing FerrBench: a modern HTTP benchmarking tool

Introducing FerrBench: a modern HTTP benchmarking tool

Published on: March 15, 2025

We are excited to announce FerrBench, a modern HTTP benchmarking tool designed to provide realistic performance metrics for modern web frameworks and servers. Based on rewrk and powered by hyper’s client API, FerrBench offers both HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 benchmarking without the outdated biases of HTTP/1 pipelining.

Why FerrBench?

Benchmarking tools like wrk have been widely used in performance testing, but they come with limitations—most notably, their reliance on HTTP/1 pipelining, which can unfairly favor certain frameworks. Modern web applications primarily operate with pipelining disabled, making those benchmarks less relevant in real-world scenarios.

FerrBench addresses these issues by:

  • Supporting HTTP/1 and HTTP/2, providing more accurate and relevant performance measurements.
  • Disabling HTTP/1 pipelining to prevent misleading results.
  • Being cross-platform, allowing developers to run benchmarks seamlessly on various operating systems.

Key features

  • Multi-threaded benchmarking - run benchmarks with multiple threads (-t) and concurrent connections (-c).
  • Percentile-based latency reporting - use --pct to gain insights into 99th and 95th percentile latencies.
  • Custom request options - specify HTTP methods (-m), headers (-H), and request bodies (-b).
  • JSON output support - use --json for machine-readable results.
  • Repeatable benchmarks - the -r flag allows multiple rounds of benchmarking for deeper analysis.

Example benchmark

Running a test with 60 concurrent connections, 12 threads, and a 5-second duration:

ferrbench -h http://127.0.0.1:5000 -t 12 -c 60 -d 5s

Output:

Benchmarking 60 connections @ http://127.0.0.1:5000 for 5 seconds
  Latencies:
    Avg      Stdev    Min      Max
    3.27ms   0.40ms   1.95ms   9.39ms
  Requests:
    Total:  91281  Req/Sec: 18227.81
  Transfer:
    Total: 1.13 MB Transfer Rate: 231.41 KB/Sec

Getting started

Install via Cargo

cargo install ferrbench --git https://github.com/ferronweb/ferrbench.git

Build from source

  1. Clone the repository:
git clone https://github.com/ferronweb/ferrbench.git && cd ferrbench
  1. Build the binary:
cargo build --release
  1. Run the benchmarker:
target/release/ferrbench -h http://127.0.0.1:5000 -c 256 -t 12 -d 15s --http2 --pct

FerrBench & Ferron: an unified vision

FerrBench is maintained by the same team behind Ferron, a fast, memory-safe web server written in Rust. Our goal is to empower developers with both high-performance web infrastructure and accurate benchmarking tools to optimize their applications.

We encourage developers to test FerrBench, contribute feedback, and help us refine benchmarking methodologies for the modern web era.

Get started with FerrBench today and ensure your performance tests reflect real-world conditions!

You can check out the FerrBench’s GitHub repository!