http
This driver allows you to make http requests using the native HTTP client that is bundled with the JVM. It supports free-form construction of requests.
You specify what a request looks like by providing a set of request parameters. They can be in either literal (static) form with no dynamic data binding, or they can each be in a string template form that draws from data bindings. Each cycle, a request is assembled from these parameters and executed.
Example Statements
The simplest possible statement form looks like this:
op: http://google.com/
Or, you can have a list:
# A list of statements
ops:
- http://google.com/
- http://amazon.com/
Or you can template the values used in the URI, and even add ratios:
# A list of named statements with variable fields and specific ratios:
ops:
- s1: http://google.com/search?query={query}
ratio: 3
- s2: https://www.amazon.com/s?k={query}
ratio: 2
bindings:
query: >
WeightedStrings('function generator;backup generator;static generator');
UrlEncode();
You can even make a detailed request with custom headers and result verification conditions:
# Require that the result be status code 200-299 match regex "OK, account id is .*" in the body
ops:
- get-from-google:
method: GET
uri: "https://google.com/"
version: "HTTP/1.1"
Content-Type: "application/json"
ok-status: "2[0-9][0-9]"
ok-body: "^(OK, account id is .*)$"
For those familiar with what an HTTP request looks like on the wire, the format below may be familiar. This isn't actually the content that is submitted, but it is recognized as a valid way to express the request parameters in a familiar and condensed form. A custom config parser makes this form available fo rhose who want to emulate a well-known pattern:
ops:
- s1: |
GET https://google.com/ HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json
ok-status: 2[0-9][0-9]
ok-body: ^(OK, account id is.*)$
Of course, in the above form, the response validators are still separate parameters.
Bindings
All request fields can be made dynamic with binding functions. To make a request that has all dynamic fields, you can do something like this:
ops:
- s1: |
{method} {scheme}://{host}:{port}/{path}?{query} {version}
Content-Type: {content_type}
Token: {mybearertoken}
{body}
The above example is in the inline request form. It is parsed and interpreted internally as if you had configured your op template like this:
ops:
- method:
uri: ://{host}:{port}/{path}?{query}
version:
"Content-Type":
"Token":
body:
The above two examples are semantically identical, only the format is different. Notice that the expansion of the URI is still captured in a field called uri, with all the dynamic pieces stitched together in the value. You can't use arbitrary request fields. Every request field must from (method, uri, version, body, ok-status, ok-body) or otherwise be capitalized to signify an HTTP header.
The HTTP RFCs do not require headers to be capitalized, but they are capitalized ubiquitously in practice, so we follow that convention here for clarity. Headers are in-fact case-insensitive, so any issues created by this indicate a non-conformant server/application implementation.
For URIs which are fully static (There are no dynamic fields, request generation will be much faster, since the request is fully built and cached at startup.
Request Fields
At a minimum, a URI must be provided. This is enough to build a request with. All other request fields are optional and have reasonable defaults:
- uri - This is the URI that you might put into the URL bar of your
browser. There is no default.
Example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonhard_Euler
If the uri contains a question mark '?' as a query delimiter, then all embedded sections which are contained withinURLENCODE[[
...]]
sections are preprocessed by the HTTP driver. This allows you to keep your test data in a recognizable form. This is done at startup, so there is no cost during the test run. As an added convenience, binding points which are within the encoded block will be preserved, so bothhttps://en.wikipedia.org/URLENCODE[[wiki/]]{topic}
andhttps://en.wikipedia.org/URLENCODE[[wiki/{topic}]]
will yield the same configuration. For a terser form, you can useE[[...]]
. You must also ensure that the values that are inserted at binding points are produced in a valid form for a URI. You can use theURLEncode()
binding function where needed to achieve this. NOTE, If you are using dynamic values for the uri field, and a test value for cycle 0 includes neitherURLENCODE[[
norE[]
, then it is skipped. You can override this withenable_urlencode: true
. - method - An optional request method. If not provided, "GET" is assumed. Any method name will work here, even custom ones that are specific to a given target system. No validation is done for standard method names, as there is no way to know what method names may be valid.
- version - The HTTP version to use. If this value is not provided, the default version for the Java HttpClient is used. If it is provided, it must be one of 'HTTP/1.1' or 'HTTP/2.0'.
- body - The content of the request body, for methods which support it.
- ok-status - An optional set of rules to verify that a response is valid. This is a simple comma or space separated list of integer status codes or a pattern which is used as a regex against the string form of a status code. If any characters other than digits spaces and commas are found in this value, then it is taken as a regex. If this is not provided, then any status code which is >=200 and <300 is considered valid.
- ok-body - An optional regex pattern which will be applied to the body to verify that it is a valid response. If this is not provided, then content bodies are read, but any content is considered valid.
Any other statement parameter which is capitalized is taken as a request header. If additional fields are provided which are not included in the above list, or which are not capitalized, then an error is thrown.
Error Handling & Retries
By default, a request which encounters an exception is retried up to 10
times. If you want to change this, set another value to the
retries=
activity parameters.
Presently, no determination is made about whether an errored response should be retryable, but it is possible to configure this if you have a specific exception type that indicates a retryable operation.
The HTTP driver is the first NB driver to include a completely
configurable error handler chain. This is explained in the
error-handlers
topic. By default, the HTTP activity's error handler is
wired to stop the activity for any error encountered.
SSL Support
SSL should work for any basic client request that doesn't need custom SSL configuration. If needed, more configurable SSL support will be added.
Client Behavior
TCP Sessions & Clients
Client instances are created for each unique space
value. NoSQLBench
provides a way for all driver adapters to instance native clients according
to a data from a binding. This is standardized under the op template parameter
space
, which is wired by default to the static value default
. This means
that each activity that uses the http driver shares a client instance across
all threads by default. If you want to have a new http client per-thread,
simply add a binding for space: ThreadNumToInteger()
and reference it in
an op template like space: {space}
, OR use an inline op field in your op
template like space: {(ThreadNumToInteger())}
.
You can use any binding function you want for the space op field. However, if you were to assign it something like "space: {(Identity()}" you would not have a good result, as you would be spinning up and caching a new http client instance for every single cycle.
Chunked encoding and web sockets
Presently, this driver only does basic request-response style requests. Thus, adding headers which take TCP socket control away from the HttpClient will likely yield inconsistent (or undefined) results. Support may be added for long-lived connections in a future release. However, chunked encoding responses are supported, although they will be received fully before being processed further. Connecting to a long-lived connection that streams chunked encoding responses indefinitely will have undefined results.
HTTP Activity Parameters
-
follow_redirects - default: normal - One of never, always, or normal. Normal redirects are those which do not redirect from HTTPS to HTTP.
-
diagnostics - default: none - synonym: diag example:
diag=brief,1000
- print diagnostics for every 1000th cycle, including only brief details as explained below.This setting is a selector for what level of verbosity you will get on the console. If you set this to
diag=all
, you'll get every request and response logged to console. This is only for verifying that a test is configured and to spot check services before running higher scale tests.All the data shown in diagnostics is post-hoc, directly from the response provided by the internal HTTP client in the Java runtime.
If you want finer control over how much information diagnostics provides, you can specify a comma separated list of the below.
- headers - show headers
- stats - show basic stats of each request
- data - show all of each response body this setting
- data10 - show only the first 10 characters of each response body
this setting supersedes
data
- data100 - show only the first 100 characters of each response body
this setting supersedes
data10
- data1000 - show only the first 1000 characters of each response body
this setting supersedes
data100
- redirects - show details for interstitial request which are made
when the client follows a redirect directive like a
location
header - requests - show details for requests
- responses - show details for responses
- codes - shows explanatory details (high-level) of http response status codes
- brief - Show headers, stats, requests, responses, and 10 characters
- all - Show everything, including full payloads and redirects
- a modulo - any number, like 3000 - causes the diagnostics to be
reported only on this cycle modulo. If you set
diag=300,brief
then you will get the brief diagnostic output for every 300th response.
The requests, responses, and redirects settings work in combination. For example, if you specify responses, and redirect, but not requests, then you will only see the response portion of all calls made by the client. All available filters layer together in this way.
-
timeout - default: forever - Sets the timeout of each request in milliseconds.