Top all-time · #1783
Grafana k6
Company blog · k6.io/blog · on HN as snikuprogrammingweb
Grafana k6 is the company blog at k6.io, writing about programming and web. Since 2017, 42 different Hacker News readers have linked it 79 times, most often “Show HN: K6.io – modern load testing tool for developers”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 15 of 38 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link k6, an open-source load testing tool where tests are written in JavaScript, as a go-to for HTTP load testing and as an alternative to JMeter. Most links are recommendations to try it.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 38 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
k6 is an open-source tool and cloud service that makes load testing easy for developers and QA engineers.
Most-linked posts?
- Show HN: K6.io – modern load testing tool for developers16 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2017-11-20
- Show HN: K6 – developer-centric load testing using Go and JavaScript7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2017-05-06
- /docs/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-10-05
- A detailed comparison of the best open-source load testing tools3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-03-05
- Testing without limits: xk6 and k6 extensions2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-12-03
- /docs/test-authoring/recording-a-session/browser-recorder2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-11-28
- /open-source/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-09-19
- New in k6 v0.29.0: Performance testing gRPC services2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-11-17
What Hacker News says?
k6.io | Go Engineer - k6 open-source developer | REMOTE in EU time-zone (CET +/- 3h) Apply at: https://k6.io/jobs or email me pawel@k6.io You will be one of four developers and maintainers of k6[0], a modern open-source tool for performance testing, written in Go. k6 was released publicly in early 2017 and has already received over 11,000 stars on GitHub. We have a quickly growing community of users and contributors…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2021)”Submitted Show HN: K6 – developer-centric load testing using Go and JavaScript as a story · 101 points
HN discussion> unless k6 has support for setting a constant RPS rate, afaik it does not Yes it can, via the `constant-arrival-rate` executor[1]. > the overhead of establishing a new TCP connection for a single HTTP request will dominate the benchmark By default, k6 will reuse TCP connections, and you have to explicitly disable it[2]. I'm not saying that wrk2 or Vegeta wouldn't be a good fit for this test, but k6 is also capable…
Comment linking /docs/using-k6/k6-options/reference
on “35M Hot Dogs: Benchmarking Caddy vs. Nginx”Submitted Launch HN: K6.io – modern, open-source load testing CLI and Cloud for developers as a story · 22 points
HN discussionWith its default settings, yes, but k6 can be configured to use an executor that implements the open model[1]. See more discussion here[2]. [1]: https://k6.io/docs/using-k6/scenarios/arrival-rate/ [2]: https://community.k6.io/t/is-k6-safe-from-the-coordinated-om...
Comment linking /docs/using-k6/scenarios/arrival-rate/
on “35M Hot Dogs: Benchmarking Caddy vs. Nginx”Submitted Show HN: K6.io – modern load testing tool for developers as a story · 22 points
HN discussionk6.io | Go Engineer - k6 open-source developer | REMOTE in Europe Apply at: https://loadimpacte4.applytojob.com/apply/utlvKOlILJ/Go-Engi... or via email pawel@k6.io You will be one of four developers and maintainers of k6[0], a modern open-source tool for performance testing, written in Go. k6 was released publicly in early 2017 and has already received over 11,000 stars on GitHub. We have a quickly growing communit…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2021)”Submitted New in k6 v0.29.0: Performance testing gRPC services as a story · 15 points
HN discussionGrafana Labs | Senior Python Engineer - k6 | REMOTE (EMEA) | Full-time | https://k6.io/ In June 2021 Grafana Labs acquired k6 - a Stockholm-based startup behind the open-source load testing tool for engineering teams. With k6, Grafana Labs adds extensible testing to its open and composable Grafana observability stack. At k6, we build next-generation performance testing tools for developers and DevOps engineers. We a…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2022)”Submitted Testing without limits: xk6 and k6 extensions as a story · 13 points
HN discussionThis used to be an issue with older k6 versions, but since v0.27.0 we have arrival-rate executors [1] that should address the biggest issue of coordinated omission. And we've always measured the max value of all metrics, even when they are not exported to some external output and we just show the end-of-test summary. It has been a while since I watched these Gil Tene talks, so I might be missing something, but I thi…
Comment linking /docs/using-k6/scenarios/arrival-rate
on “K6: Like unit testing, for performance”Submitted K6's next-generation runtime: bash as a story · 12 points
HN discussionThat's an interesting talk. k6 allows the user to choose[1] which metrics are relevant for the particular test. By default, it displays max or p(100), p(95), p(90), min, med, and avg. User can specify other values such as p(99.995) It's also possible to create completely custom metrics[2] to track whatever is relevant to the user. k6 allows the user to change almost all aspects of execution, tracking, and reporting.…
Comment linking /docs/using-k6/metrics
on “K6: Like unit testing, for performance”Submitted A detailed comparison of the best open-source load testing tools as a story · 12 points
HN discussionTsung was made in another era, before devops. I think it shows in the UX and everywhere when using the tool that it wasn't really meant for developers. Specifically, and with the disclaimer that I haven't used Tsung so much, I'd say the biggest difference is that k6 tests are scripted in a real language (JS) as compared to Tsung's XML. But k6 also has a modern CLI UX that beats Tsung (and most other tools) by a mile…
Comment linking /blog/another-load-testing-tool
on “K6: Like unit testing, for performance”Submitted Performance Testing gRPC Services as a story · 9 points
HN discussionThe canonical way to record web traffic are HAR files: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAR_(file_format) You can export HAR files from all web browsers and a lot of proxies and other tools. Then you can convert that recording to a k6 script with our HAR converter: https://k6.io/docs/test-authoring/recording-a-session/har-co... We also have browser plugins to directly record browser traffic and import it as a k6 script…
Comment linking /docs/test-authoring/recording-a-session/browser-recorder
on “K6: Like unit testing, for performance”Submitted K6 v0.29.0 Released as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThat's what k6 does. It's called soak testing: https://k6.io/docs/test-types/soak-testing I use it with influxdb and grafana. Set it up with one virtual user running for 6 hours, requesting different endpoints, you should get the 1req/sec.
Comment linking /docs/test-types/soak-testing
on “K6: Like unit testing, for performance”Submitted How to predict growth after being on Hacker News as a story · 4 points
HN discussionBeyond technology stack choices I'd say the biggest differences are that k6 is scriptable in JS whereas Tsung has scripting-like capabilities in XML, and that Tsung supports distributed execution of tests which k6 doesn't support yet (only in our SaaS product). Tsung also supports more protocols than k6 at the moment (eg. AMQP, MQTT, PostgreSQL etc.) but k6 supports HTTP/2 and gRPC which Tsung doesn't so depends on…
Comment linking /blog/comparing-best-open-source-load-testing-tools
on “K6: Like unit testing, for performance”Submitted Browser automation and end-to-end web testing with k6 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis very much depends on your available hardware and the complexity of the load test. Following the advice in https://k6.io/docs/testing-guides/running-large-tests , and having a beefy load generation machine and network, you should be able to run many thousands of VUs on a single instance pretty comfortably. How many thousands precisely depends on a lot of factors... :)
Comment linking /docs/testing-guides/running-large-tests
on “K6: Like unit testing, for performance”Submitted Load Testing Your API with Swagger/OpenAPI and K6 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI wrote a blog article comparing the most popular open source tools out there - https://k6.io/blog/comparing-best-open-source-load-testing-t... Disclaimer: I'm one of the people who created k6 Warning: The article is pretty long...
Comment linking /blog/comparing-best-open-source-load-testing-tools
on “K6: Like unit testing, for performance”Submitted Get Started with K6 Browser as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThat's one of the main uses, yes. Although k6 gives you a lot of flexibility to decide what your pass/fail criteria are with its custom metrics ( https://k6.io/docs/using-k6/metrics#custom-metrics ), checks ( https://k6.io/docs/using-k6/checks ) and thresholds ( https://k6.io/docs/using-k6/thresholds ). See the example in https://github.com/loadimpact/k6/#checks-and-thresholds . If, at the end of the test run, some…
Comment linking /docs/using-k6/thresholds
on “K6: Like unit testing, for performance”Submitted The Reverse Load Test as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI might be missing something, but k6 should be able to completely cover all of your use cases? I am one of the k6 developers, can you share exactly what the missing piece was? > tests that would run much much more often (like every seconds or couple of seconds), in a continuous manner. You can do that, just use an arrival-rate executor that runs an iteration every second, with a test duration of 365 days or somethin…
Comment linking /docs/using-k6/scenarios
on “K6: Like unit testing, for performance”Submitted K6 guide on load testing websites as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
