Mastering API Load Testing: Postman, ApacheBench, JMeter & Java Concurrency

1. Postman

Postman is an HTTP request simulation tool. The article demonstrates its basic usage by creating a Spring Boot project with a simple controller:

import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.GetMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController;

@RestController
@RequestMapping("test")
public class TestConrtoller {
    @GetMapping("demo")
    public String testDemo() {
        return "result~";
    }
}

Set the common base URL (e.g., http://127.0.0.1:8080) in Postman's global environment for easy reuse, then run concurrency tests via the Concurrency feature, observing CPU usage and log output.

2. Apache Bench (AB)

ApacheBench (ab) is a lightweight command‑line web stress testing tool that comes with Apache HTTP Server. To use it on Windows, download the appropriate binary from the Apache website, extract it, and configure httpd.conf (set ServerRoot, Listen, and DocumentRoot as needed). After installing the service ( httpd.exe -k install) and starting it ( httpd.exe -k start), run tests with options such as -n for total requests and -c for concurrency, e.g.:

ab -n 1000 -c 50 http://127.0.0.1:8080/test/demo