Flood is a profile-driven HTTP load tester. It is a software that is capable of generating large amount of web traffic, so you can measure performance of your web application. Flood can also postprocess web server responses, so you also can check your web application for correct behaviour.

Being profile-driven means, that nearly all actions related to creating and performing a request, are controlled by a set of rules. Those rules together create a profile. By using different profiles and the same set of URLs, you might get quite different results. Moreover, particular profiles are usefull in conjunction with different types of tests. As far as web applications are concerned, we can distinguish three types of tests. These are:

With a little bit of tweaking flood can be useful, regardless of which type of test you are going to perform.

Flood aims to be modular and extensible. It is fairly easy to write flood extension providing new functionality. Hence flood can be easily extended to suit just about everybody needs. Right now it can be used in most enviroments without the need for writting external modules. Current flood feature list follows:

Flood has a homepage available: http://httpd.apache.org/test/flood. Be sure to check it often for news and releases. If you have a burning question, or would like to report a problem (patches welcome), then please subscribe to flood developemnt mailing list: test-dev@httpd.apache.org, by sending an empty e-mail to adress: <test-dev-subscribe@httpd.apache.org> and following instructions in response.