Typhoon - A minimal load testing framework in Elixir

Hello! I’ve been building Typhoon, a protocol-agnostic load testing framework in Elixir, and would like to share it with you all.

I needed to load test an Elixir backend that implements a custom binary protocol. I’m quite familiar with Gatling and used it many times, but my entire client implementation was already in Elixir — reimplementing the protocol in Gatling was more work than writing the load framework in Elixir and reusing what I had.

So, with that in mind, I wrote Typhoon.

Typhoon assumes nothing about your protocol. The unit of work is a step: a plain function that invokes your client. Steps chain into a scenario. Scenarios can also be chained together to compose more elaborate tests.

Typhoon runs the load around it:

• virtual users replaying a scenario concurrently
• ramp up, and profiles for hold / spike / ramp down
• a fixed number of iterations, or a fixed duration
• setup and teardown hooks, with state carried through the steps
• latency and throughput reported per step
• optional datasets — feed a file through your service exactly once, or cycle it for the whole run

It works for plain HTTP too, but the point is the cases where nothing off the shelf fits.

Most of the features are inspired from my experience with Gatling, and some nice-to-have features that were missing in Gatling (fixed datasets).

I’ve been using this comfortably for the past 2 weeks, generating upto 6k concurrent connections from my local machine to the server.

If you’ve been looking for something like this, hopefully this will solve your problems.

Not on Hex yet; install from Git.