WBox
HTTP testing tool
Wbox aims to help you having fun while testing HTTP related stuff. You can use it to perform many tasks, including the following.
- Benchmarking how much time it takes to generate content for your web application.
- Web server and web application stressing.
- Testing virtual domains configuration without the need to alter your local resolver.
- Check if your redirects are working correctly emitting the right HTTP code.
- Test if the HTTP compression is working and if it is actually serving pages faster.
- Use it as a configuration-less HTTP server to share files! (see the server mode documentation at the end of the Wbox tutorial in this page, but it's as simple as % wbox servermode webroot /tmp)
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10 Dec 2009 - wbox version 5 is out. Changes: Switched to BSD license and other non-coding changes before to enter Debian.
10 Jun 2007 - wbox version 4 is out. Changes: stats with min/avg/max times on exit, no more defunct childs, the new close option (see doc below), in server mode Index of ... no longer reveals the real filesystem path, source code cleanup and many fixes.
8 Jun 2007 - wbox version 3 is out, ability to set referer and cookies inside! Along with many bug fixes (and many new bugs I guess).
7 Jun 2007 - wbox version 2 is out, server mode inside!.
5 Jun 2007 - wbox version 1 is out.
Don't miss the next release, use the Wbox RSS feed
In order to compile wbox you need a working ANSI C compiler and a POSIX system like Linux. Windows systems are supported by compiling Wbox on Cygwin. Wbox compiles under MacOS X without problems.
Windows binaries
If you want to use WBox under Windows but don't know how to compile it you can download this precompiled binary of Wbox version 3 for Windows (Thanks to Zaim Bakar).
Wbox tutorial
HTTP client mode
The following is a short tutorial. Wbox is trivial to use but you may want to read this in order to understand better what wbox is and how to use it.
Basic usage
The simplest way to use wbox is to call it with just one argument, an url:% wbox www.google.it WBOX www.google.it (64.233.183.99) port 80 0. 200 OK 3774 bytes 407 ms 1. 200 OK (3767) bytes 273 ms 2. 200 OK 3767 bytes 304 ms 3. 200 OK 3767 bytes 260 ms user terminatedAs you can see wbox in this mode of operation resembles the ping utility. For every performed HTTP request it shows the sequence number of the request (0.), the HTTP reply code and reason string (200 OK), the number of bytes received from the server (3774 bytes), and the time the request took to complete in milliseconds (407 ms). There are two details to note.
- The number of received bytes includes the HTTP reply header, so it is not equal to the document length.
- Every time it changes compared to the previous HTTP reply, the number of received bytes is put between parens, like in (3767)
Limiting the number of requests
By default wbox will continue to perform requests forever, until you don't press Ctrl+C. After the url argument you can pass a number of options to wbox to alter its behaviour, one of this is an integer number specifying how many requests to perform.% wbox www.google.it/notexistingpage.html 1 WBOX www.google.it (64.233.183.103) port 80 0. 404 Not Found 1495 bytes 310 msThis time wbox terminated after the first request was received.
Obtaining splitted timing information
Usually web applications don't spend the same time in the generation of every part of the page. With wbox it's possible to obtain time information for different parts of the document using the timesplit option.
% wbox digg.com timesplit 1
WBOX digg.com (64.191.203.30) port 80
0. 200 OK 44134 bytes 1326 ms
[0] 0-4095 -> 728 ms
[1] 4096-8191 -> 254 ms
[2] 8192-12287 -> 16 ms
[3] 12288-16383 -> 17 ms
[4] 16384-20479 -> 225 ms
[5] 20480-24575 -> 12 ms
[6] 24576-28671 -> 16 ms
[7] 28672-32767 -> 18 ms
[8] 32768-36863 -> 16 ms
[9] 36864-40959 -> 16 ms
[10] 40960-44133 -> 8 ms
Dumping data
We may like to see what kind of HTTP reply google is emitting on 404 errors, the option showhdr tells wbox to dump the HTTP reply header.% wbox www.google.it/notexistingpage.html 1 showhdr WBOX www.google.it (64.233.183.103) port 80 HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found Content-Type: text/html Server: GWS/2.1 Content-Length: 1368 Date: Tue, 05 Jun 2007 16:49:58 GMT 0. 404 Not Found 1495 bytes 540 msWe may like to use wbox inside a shell script in order to collect different headers, so the option silent tells wbox to don't show status lines.
% wbox www.google.it/notexistingpage.html 1 showhdr silent HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found Content-Type: text/html Server: GWS/2.1 Content-Length: 1368 Date: Tue, 05 Jun 2007 16:51:52 GMTIt's also possible to dump the whole reply using the dump option.
% wbox www.google.it/notexistingpage.html 1 dump silent
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Content-Type: text/html
Server: GWS/2.1
Content-Length: 1368
Date: Tue, 05 Jun 2007 16:53:44 GMT
<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8">
<title>404 Not Found</title>
<style><!--
body {font-family: arial,sans-serif}
div.nav {margin-top: 1ex}
(a lot of data omitted)
You can use dump and timesplit at the same time in order to get a dump of the reply with time annotations, but warning! using this feature the time used in order to produce the actual output on screen will alter the results, so you must redirect the output into a file. The right command line to use is the following:
% wbox http://digg.com dump timesplit 1 > /tmp/dump.txtThen open the file with an editor to see the HTTP reply splitted in chunks of data separated by time annotations.
Stressing servers and apps
Instead to make a single request it's possible to make multiple concurrent requests using the clients number option. Wbox will spawn the required number of processes, and every process will perform a query every second.% wbox http://localhost clients 4 WBOX localhost (127.0.0.1) port 80 0. 200 OK 9939 bytes 14 ms 0. 200 OK 9939 bytes 22 ms 0. 200 OK 9939 bytes 26 ms 0. 200 OK 9939 bytes 31 ms 1. 200 OK 9939 bytes 4 ms 1. 200 OK 9939 bytes 7 ms 1. 200 OK 9939 bytes 7 ms 1. 200 OK 9939 bytes 4 ms 2. 200 OK 9939 bytes 4 ms 2. 200 OK 9939 bytes 6 ms 2. 200 OK 9939 bytes 10 ms 2. 200 OK 9939 bytes 3 ms 3. 200 OK 9939 bytes 3 ms 3. 200 OK 9939 bytes 4 ms 3. 200 OK 9939 bytes 7 ms 3. 200 OK 9939 bytes 7 ms user terminatedEvery client will print a status line, so you can get an idea about delays under load. Note that's much better to perform this tests on localhost or over LAN in order to filter bandwidth limits that may otherwise alter the numbers.
Modifing requests period
By default wbox will perform a request per second, you can change this using the option wait seconds (for every process). Set it to zero in order to perform continuous requests without delay between them using wait 0.Setting cookies and referer
Many web applications perform different tasks for the same url if some cookie is set to the right value. One obvious example is a login cookie. Wbox is able to perform requests containing cookies using the option cookie name value like in the following example.% wbox hping.org cookie secret ff8a45a7It is possible to use the cookie option multiple times to set more than a cookie. Another parameter that sometimes may change the target site behaviour is the Referer header. It is possbile to set it using the referer url option.
Testing virtual domains
Sometimes after you configured a new virtual domain in your web server it's handly to check if everything is working as it should before DNS propagation and without the need to alter by hand your /etc/hosts. You can use the host name wbox option in order to do this.% wbox 64.233.183.99 host www.google.it dump WBOX www.google.it (64.233.183.99) port 80 HTTP/1.1 200 OK Cache-Control: private Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=81ccf41f3364e7fa:TM=1181063780:LM=1181063780:S=yd7lfPo-SBZTngH_; expires=Sun, 17-Jan-2038 19:14:07 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.it Server: GWS/2.1 Transfer-Encoding: chunked Date: Tue, 05 Jun 2007 17:16:20 GMT d6f <html>... (data omitted)
Testing HTTP compression
Using the compr option wbox will include the right headers to accept the gzip/deflate data encoding. If the web server supports compression it will reply with compressed data, and wbox will show this fact in the reply status lines.% wbox antirez.com compr WBOX antirez.com (62.149.233.114) port 80 [compr] 0. 200 OK 6553 bytes 837 ms compr 1. 200 OK 6553 bytes 301 ms compr user terminatedIt is sometimes interesting to check the time required to complete the request with and without the HTTP compression just including/excluding the compr option from the command line.
A few more options
- http10 tells wbox to use HTTP/1.0 in the request, avoiding chunked data output.
- head forces wbox to use the HEAD method instead of GET.
- close close the connection after few bytes received. Handy to check just latency against big pages/files, to check what happens on end of file from client conditions, ...
- Use wbox -h in order to list all the available options.
HTTP server mode
Wbox implements a minimal configuration-less HTTP server. It is useful as a quick way to share files in a LAN or via Internet, so it implements directory listing by default. In order to start this mode just use the following command line (assuming documents you want to share are in /tmp/mydocs):% wbox servermode webroot /tmp/mydocsThan play with it conneting to http://127.0.0.1:8081 since Wbox for default uses the 8081 TCP port. You can change this default using the serverport port option.