What is bombardier?

bombardier is a command-line tool written in Go for HTTP benchmarking. Benchmarking a web server means sending a large number of requests to it and measuring how many it handles per second, how fast it responds, and whether it returns errors. This kind of testing is used to understand how a server holds up under heavy load before putting it into production. You run it by pointing it at a URL and specifying how many concurrent connections to open, along with either a total request count or a duration to run for. The output shows the average requests per second, average response time, standard deviation and maximum of response times, a breakdown of HTTP status codes received, and overall data throughput in megabytes per second. An optional latency distribution flag also shows how fast the slowest 50%, 75%, 90%, and 99% of requests were answered, which gives a clearer picture of how a server behaves in its worst cases rather than just its average. By default, bombardier uses fasthttp, a high-performance HTTP library that lets it sustain very high request rates. For servers that use HTTP/2, or where specific header handling is required, you can switch it to use Go's standard net/http library instead via a command-line flag. Pre-built binaries for each supported platform are available in the releases section of the repository. Go developers can also install the latest version with a single command using the Go toolchain.