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Vegeta was designed to be run on the command line; it reads from stdin a list of HTTP transactions to generate, and sends results in binary format to stdout,

Vegeta is a really strong tool that caters to people who want a tool to test simple, static URLs (perhaps API end points) but also want a bit more functionality.

Vegeta can even be used as a Golang library/package if you want to create your own load testing tool.

Wrk is so damn fast

being fast and measuring correctly is about all that Wrk does

k6 is scriptable in plain Javascript

k6 is average or better. In some categories (documentation, scripting API, command line UX) it is outstanding.

Jmeter is a huge beast compared to most other tools.

Siege is a simple tool, similar to e.g. Apachebench in that it has no scripting and is primarily used when you want to hit a single, static URL repeatedly.

A good way of testing the testing tools is to not test them on your code, but on some third-party thing that is sure to be very high-performing.

use a tool like e.g. top to keep track of Nginx CPU usage while testing. If you see just one process, and see it using close to 100% CPU, it means you could be CPU-bound on the target side.

If you see multiple Nginx processes but only one is using a lot of CPU, it means your load testing tool is only talking to that particular worker process.

Network delay is also important to take into account as it sets an upper limit on the number of requests per second you can push through.

If, say, the Nginx default page requires a transfer of 250 bytes to load, it means that if the servers are connected via a 100 Mbit/s link, the theoretical max RPS rate would be around 100,000,000 divided by 8 (bits per byte) divided by 250 => 100M/2000 = 50,000 RPS. Though that is a very optimistic calculation - protocol overhead will make the actual number a lot lower so in the case above I would start to get worried bandwidth was an issue if I saw I could push through max 30,000 RPS, or something like that.

Wrk managed to push through over 50,000 RPS and that made 8 Nginx workers on the target system consume about 600% CPU.