Grasshopper For API Load Testing With Python
Written by Nikos Vaggalis   
Monday, 12 June 2023

Grasshopper is a great library for automated load testing. It is made with Python and is open source.

Grasshopper was started as a fork of Locust, another load testing library, in order to extend the former with extra capabilities deemed necessary for Alteryx's operations. Mainly to measure timings that span multiple HTTP requests and aggregate metrics for a or report those metrics to a time-series database.

In Locust you defined the behavior of your users in regular Python code, instead of being constrained by a UI or domain specific language that only pretends to be real code. This made Locust infinitely expandable and very developer friendly. And this is the property that Grasshopper is based on.

In Locust, you can write user test scenarios in plain old Python and use it in distributed scenarios that support hundreds of thousands of users. It also has a web-based UI with which you can test any system. Although Locust primarily works with web sites/services, it can be used to test almost any system or protocol.

On top of these features Grasshoper adds :

  • Checks
    Assertions that are recorded as a metric. Useful to ensure the test is working correctly and to evaluate if the load is causing intermittent failures.
  • Custom trends
    Custom trends are useful when you want to time something that spans multiple HTTP calls.
  • Timing thresholds
  • Streamlined metric reporting/tagging system 
    Metrics that are automatically reported to tables within the locust timeseries database via the specified URL, to analyze them using Grafana in real time, or after the test has completed.

Grasshoper can be easily installed with

pip install locust-grasshopper

To get a head start, just examine the test_example. py inside the example directory to understand how to start writing yor tests.

So there you have it. A Python-based, modular, easily extendable and easy-to-use tool to cater for all your Web testing needs.

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More Information

Grasshoper

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Last Updated ( Monday, 12 June 2023 )