http-ping

Http-Ping

http-ping is a free software distributed under the Apache License 2.0.

This piece of software is similar to the usual ping networking utility but instead of working on top of ICMP, it works on top of HTTP/S.

Http-Ping is a small, free, easy-to-use command-line utility that probes a given URL and displays relevant statistics. It is similar to the popular ping utility, but works over HTTP/S instead of ICMP, and with a URL instead of a computer name/IP address. http-ping supports IPv6 addresses.

Platforms

This software is written in Go, and should then benefit from the wide list of targets provided by Go.

This software has been reported to work well on:

• Linux: amd64, 386, arm64, arm
• FreeBSD: amd64, 386
• Windows: amd64, 386, arm64
• MacOS: amd64 (Intel Macs), arm64 (Apple Silicon)

Usage

Simply type http-ping -h to get the list of available commands

$ http-ping -h
An utility that evaluates the latency and throuput of HTTP/S requests

Usage:
  http-ping [flags] target-URL

Flags:
  -a, --audible-bell                  audible ; include a bell (ASCII 0x07) character in the outhroughput when any successful answer is received
      --auth-password string          authentication password
      --auth-username string          authentication username
      --conn-target string            force connection to be done with a specific IP:port (i.e. 127.0.0.1:8080)
      --cookie stringArray            add one or more cookies, in the form name=value
  -c, --count int                     define the number of request to be sent (default unlimited)
      --disable-compression           the client will not request the remote server to compress answers (hence it might actually do it)
  -K, --disable-keepalive             disable keep-alive feature
      --dns-cache                     cache DNS requests
  -D, --dns-full-resolution           enable full DNS resolution from the root servers
  -d, --dns-server string             specify an alternate DNS server for resolutions
  -x, --extra-parameter               extra changing parameter, add an extra changing parameter to the request to avoid being cached by reverse proxy
  -F, --follow-redirects              follow HTTP redirects (codes 3xx)
  -H, --head                          perform HTTP HEAD requests instead of GETs
      --header stringArray            add one or more header, in the form name=value
  -h, --help                          help for http-ping
      --http-versions                 detect HTTP protocol versions available on target
  -1, --http1                         use the HTTP/1 protocol
  -2, --http2                         use the HTTP/2 protocol
  -3, --http3                         use the HTTP/3 protocol
  -k, --insecure                      allow insecure server connections when using SSL
  -i, --interval duration             define the wait time between each request (default 1s)
  -4, --ipv4                          force IPv4 resolution for dual-stacked sites
  -6, --ipv6                          force IPv6 resolution for dual-stacked sites
      --keep-cookies                  keep received cookies between requests
      --method string                 select a which HTTP method to be used (default "GET")
      --no-server-error               ignore server errors (5xx), do not handle them as "lost pings"
      --parameter stringArray         add one or more parameters to the query, in the form name:value
  -q, --quiet                         print less details
      --referrer string               define the referrer
  -t, --throughput                    log the number of requests done per second
  -T, --throughput-refresh duration   sampling time for measuring throughput (default 5s)
      --user-agent string             define a custom user-agent (default "Http-Ping/(devel) (https://github.com/fever-ch/http-ping)")
  -v, --verbose                       print more details
      --version                       version for http-ping
  -w, --wait duration                 define the time for a response before timing out (default 10s)
      --workers int                   define the number of workers to be used (default 1)

Latency

Measure the latency with the Google Cloud Zurich region with 4 HTTP pings (-c 4):

$ http-ping https://europe-west6-5tkroniexa-oa.a.run.app/api/ping -c 4
HTTP-PING https://europe-west6-5tkroniexa-oa.a.run.app/api/ping GET

   ─→     server advertised HTTP/3 endpoint, using HTTP/3

       1: HTTP/3.0, 216.239.32.53:443, code=200, size=13 bytes, time=28.4 ms
       2: HTTP/3.0, 216.239.32.53:443, code=200, size=13 bytes, time=28.9 ms
       3: HTTP/3.0, 216.239.32.53:443, code=200, size=13 bytes, time=29.5 ms
       4: HTTP/3.0, 216.239.32.53:443, code=200, size=13 bytes, time=29.5 ms

--- https://europe-west6-5tkroniexa-oa.a.run.app/api/ping ping statistics ---
4 requests sent, 4 answers received, 0.0% loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 28.444/29.094/29.538/0.456 ms

Measure the latency with Google Cloud Zurich region with ten HTTP pings (-c 10), disabling socket reuse (-K), using a HEAD request (-H), and in verbose mode (-v):

$ http-ping https://europe-west6-5tkroniexa-oa.a.run.app/api/ping -c 10 -K -H --http2 -v
HTTP-PING https://europe-west6-5tkroniexa-oa.a.run.app/api/ping HEAD

       0: HTTP/2.0, 216.239.36.53:443, code=200, size=0 bytes, time=59.7 ms
          proto=HTTP/2.0, socket reused=false, compressed=true
          network i/o: bytes read=4713, bytes written=669
          tls version=TLS-1.3

          latency contributions:
            59.7 ms request and response
                     ├─   39.1 ms connection setup
                     │             ├─    3.9 ms DNS resolution
                     │             ├─    9.0 ms TCP handshake
                     │             └─   26.0 ms TLS handshake
                     ├─    0.9 ms request sending
                     ├─   17.3 ms wait
                     └─    0.2 ms response ingestion

       ...

       9: HTTP/2.0, 216.239.36.53:443, code=200, size=0 bytes, time=53.5 ms
          proto=HTTP/2.0, socket reused=false, compressed=true
          network i/o: bytes read=4713, bytes written=669
          tls version=TLS-1.3

          latency contributions:
            53.5 ms request and response
                     ├─   35.2 ms connection setup
                     │             ├─    3.4 ms DNS resolution
                     │             ├─    8.7 ms TCP handshake
                     │             └─   22.9 ms TLS handshake
                     ├─    0.1 ms request sending
                     ├─   18.0 ms wait
                     └─    0.1 ms response ingestion
                     
--- https://europe-west6-5tkroniexa-oa.a.run.app/api/ping ping statistics ---
10 requests sent, 10 answers received, 0.0% loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 52.900/56.048/59.653/2.089 ms

average latency contributions:
            56.0 ms request and response
                     ├─   37.7 ms connection setup
                     │             ├─    3.6 ms DNS resolution
                     │             ├─    9.5 ms TCP handshake
                     │             └─   24.5 ms TLS handshake
                     ├─    0.1 ms request sending
                     ├─   17.7 ms wait
                     └─    0.2 ms response ingestion

note: the latency contribution tree only covers the main steps of the HTTP exchange, thus the sum doesn't fully match.

Throughput

http-ping can also be used to measure the throughput given by an HTTP/S setup.

Beware, this measure generates, by design, a lot of traffic on the target, thus it might deteriorate the overall service during the time of measurement. This feature is more appropriate when you want to test your own servers.

Measure the maximum throughput to URL-TO-TEST by not waiting between request (-i 0s), by enabling throughput measurement (-t) and, by allocating 64 workers (--workers 64)

> http-ping --workers 64 -i 0s -t URL-TO-TEST
HTTP-PING URL-TO-TEST GET

          throughput: 1922.0 queries/sec, average latency: 32.6 ms
          throughput: 2037.6 queries/sec, average latency: 31.4 ms
          throughput: 1951.0 queries/sec, average latency: 32.8 ms
          throughput: 2006.9 queries/sec, average latency: 31.8 ms
          throughput: 1871.5 queries/sec, average latency: 34.1 ms
^C
--- URL-TO-TEST ping statistics ---
50470 requests sent, 50470 answers received, 0.0% loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 22.034/32.464/87.484/6.929 ms

throughput measures:
queries throughput min/avg/max/stdev = 1871.5/1957.8/2037.6/59.3 queries/sec  

Install on Linux

The releases are providing packages for the following systems:

• deb: Debian, Ubuntu, ...
• rpm: RedHat, CentOS, SuSE, ...
• apk: Alpine

n.b.: http-ping uses ca-certificates in order to authenticate the CA signature on the server certificates in communications over HTTPS.

Install with Homebrew (Mac/Linux)

A third party repository, fever-ch/tap, provides up-to-date formula to deploy http-ping easily on platforms supported by Homebrew.

To install using Brew, run the following command:

$ brew install fever-ch/tap/http-ping

Install on Linux/FreeBSD/MacOS/Windows

The releases page also provides archives that contain the binary executable file, tar.gz files for Linux/FreeBSD/MacOS and zip files for Windows.

Use with Docker

$ docker run --rm feverch/http-ping

Note: images are published as feverch/http-ping (Central Docker registry) or ghcr.io/fever-ch/http-ping (Github Container registry)

Build your own binaries

You can easily build http-ping, if golang is installed on your system.

$ go install fever.ch/http-ping@latest

Notes

HTTP/3 support

HTTP/3 support is brought by a 3rd-party library QUIC-Go which APIs differs a bit from the Go's HTTP (net/http) libraries that are used for HTTP/1 and HTTP/2.

Support for HTTP/3 came with version 1.2.0, and still needs to be considered as experimental.