If you need a quick and easy way to stress test your PHP application by sending a lot of POST requests with some JSON, this post is for you.

What you will need for this:

1. ApacheBench (official link)
2. A file with some JSON in it

First, let's create our file.

cd stress-folder
touch data.txt
nano data.txt

Paste your JSON. It could be something simple such as {"name": "Dummy Name"}

Excellent work so far.

Now for the test command. You might be already familiar with the classic command:

ab -n 100 -c 10 "http://localhost:8080/"

In our case we would need to write

ab -p data.txt -T application/json -n 100 -c 10 http://localhost:8080/

And, if you also need to send some headers

ab -p data.txt -T application/json -H 'Header-Name: header-value' -n 100 -c 10 http://localhost:3000/

Hints:

• if you need multiple headers sent, you simply add multiple -H flags.
• you can also send cookies with the -C flag.
• maybe add the -k flag to Enable KeepAlive