hey

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

20242 stars · 1303 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

hey is a small command-line HTTP load generator written in Go, originally named boom and designed as a replacement for ApacheBench (ab). It sends a configurable number of concurrent requests to a web application and prints latency and throughput statistics, with support for HTTP/2, custom headers, methods, bodies, and CSV output.

Use cases

• load test a web endpoint with concurrent requests
• benchmark api response times
• replace apachebench ab for http load testing
• run a 30 second stress test against my server
• send POST requests with custom bodies and headers to measure throughput
• generate load with a fixed queries-per-second rate limit
• export load test metrics to csv

When to choose

• you need a quick, single-binary CLI load generator without scripting
• you want an ApacheBench alternative with HTTP/2 and rate limiting support
• you need simple latency/throughput stats or CSV output for an HTTP endpoint

When to avoid

• you need distributed load generation from multiple machines
• you require complex scenario scripting, assertions, or browser-level testing
• you need non-HTTP protocols like gRPC, WebSocket, or TCP load tests

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

load-testing http-client benchmarking developer-tools web-development performance windows cli cross-platform http-load-generator apachebench-replacement stress-testing go command-line linux macos

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="rakyll/hey")