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What is Locust?
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Locust is an easy to use, scriptable and scalable performance testing tool.

You define the behaviour of your users in regular Python code, instead of using a clunky UI or domain specific language.

This makes Locust infinitely expandable and very developer friendly.

To start using Locust, go to :ref:`installation`

Features
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* **Write user test scenarios in plain-old Python**

 If you want your users to loop, perform some conditional behaviour or do some calculations, you just use the regular programming constructs provided by Python.
 Locust runs every user inside its own greenlet (a lightweight process/coroutine). This enables you to write your tests like normal (blocking) Python code instead of having to use callbacks or some other mechanism.
 Because your scenarios are "just python" you can use your regular IDE, and version control your tests as regular code (as opposed to some other tools that use XML or binary formats)

* **Distributed & Scalable - supports hundreds of thousands of users**

 Locust makes it easy to run load tests distributed over multiple machines.
 It is event-based (using `gevent <http://www.gevent.org/>`_), which makes it possible for a single process to handle many thousands concurrent users.
 While there may be other tools that are capable of doing more requests per second on a given hardware, the low overhead of each Locust user makes it very suitable for testing highly concurrent workloads.
 
* **Web-based UI**

 Locust has a user friendly web interface that shows the progress of your test in real-time. You can even change the load while the test is running. It can also be run without the UI, making it easy to use for CI/CD testing.

* **Can test any system**

 Even though Locust primarily works with web sites/services, it can be used to test almost any system or protocol. Just :ref:`write a client <testing-other-systems>` 
 for what you want to test, or `explore some created by the community <https://github.com/SvenskaSpel/locust-plugins#users>`_.

* **Hackable**

 Locust is small and very flexible and we intend to keep it that way. If you want to `send reporting data to that database & graphing system you like <https://github.com/SvenskaSpel/locust-plugins/blob/master/locust_plugins/listeners.py>`_, wrap calls to a REST API to handle the particulars of your system or run a :ref:`totally custom load pattern <generating-custom-load-shape>`, there is nothing stopping you!

Name & background
=================

Locust was born out of a frustration with existing solutions. No existing load testing tool was well equipped to generate realistic 
load against a dynamic website where most pages had different content for different users. Existing tools used clunky interfaces or 
verbose configuration files to declare the tests. In Locust we took a different approach. Instead of configuration formats or UIs 
you'd get a python framework that would let you define the behaviour of your users using Python code. 

`Locust <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locust>`_ takes its name from the grasshopper species, known for their swarming behaviour. 

Previous versions of Locust used terminology borrowed from nature (swarming, hatching, attacking etc), but now employs more industry standard naming.

:ref:`history`

Authors
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- `Jonatan Heyman <http://heyman.info>`_ (`@jonatanheyman <https://twitter.com/jonatanheyman>`_ on Twitter)
- Lars Holmberg (`@cyberw <https://github.com/cyberw>`_ on Github)
- Carl Byström (`@cgbystrom <https://twitter.com/cgbystrom>`_ on Twitter)
- Joakim Hamrén (`@Jahaaja <https://twitter.com/Jahaaja>`_ on Twitter)
- Hugo Heyman (`@hugoheyman <https://twitter.com/hugoheyman>`_ on Twitter)

Many thanks to our other great `contributors <https://github.com/locustio/locust/graphs/contributors>`_!


License
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Open source licensed under the MIT license (see LICENSE file for details).

