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Vitali Haradkou
Vitali Haradkou

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Perfscale news #1. OSS, QUERY method

Today's news from the Perfscale trenches:

  • Perfscale goes Open Source
  • QUERY method support
  • Applying to the LvlUp venture fund

🔓 Open Source

Let's start with open source. I finally decided to open up part of the engine, and created a dedicated GitHub organization — Perfscale/perfscale. The code was translated with the help of AI, so there may be rough edges.

As part of the migration, I also set up benchmarking. Since Perfscale can run Locust and k6 (JMeter isn't open-sourced yet), the benchmark builds and compares itself against the previous run to track progress over time. Here's an example of such a job.
The benchmark covers baseline resource usage plus overhead compared to other frameworks, and includes micro-benchmarks as well.
The number of checks will grow significantly in the future — there's no WebSocket support yet, and there's a lot of room to expand there.

Fun fact: the fastest and most efficient engine turned out to be YAML. No extra resources need to be allocated to execute third-party code. I plan to keep investing in the YAML engine — I have plenty of ideas for where the YAML syntax can go.

🆕 The QUERY HTTP Method

If you follow my Telegram channel @haradkou_sdet, you've probably seen the news about RFC 10008. In short: this method was designed for idempotent requests — same input, same result. Query strings have a length limit and can carry vulnerabilities. Now the number of potential vulnerabilities can be even bigger :)
So we've added QUERY support for HTTP requests. In YAML it looks like this:

steps:
  - name: product search
    use: std/http@v1
    with:
      method: QUERY
      url: api.example.com/products/search
      body:
        category: "electronics"
        price_max: 500
    check:
      status: 200
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I haven't yet seen a backend in the wild that actually uses the QUERY method, but it's nice to brag that we're the first (server-side) load testing tool that natively supports sending it. Achievement unlocked: first on the server! 🏆

💰 The LvlUp Venture Fund

I decided to apply to the Western fund LvlUp, and just recently, I got an email saying that SHOPLINE (NASDAQ: JOYY) is interested in the project. Nothing is clear yet, but we'll see. Honestly, I'm not thrilled about applying to funds — but given the specifics of the load testing market, there seems to be no other way: you need well-placed contacts at big companies, and I don't have those.

🤝 Looking for Partners

If you're a business that finds it hard (or painful) to hire a load testing engineer, we're looking for clients like you. Especially if you build websites and apps for customers, we have a lot of common ground. Our platform starts at just ~$50/month — far cheaper than hiring a full-time performance engineer. Reach me on Telegram: @vitalicset

We handle the load so you can offload!
❤️ — The Perfscale team

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