hey

hey is a small HTTP load generator for benchmarking a web endpoint from the shell. It sends concurrent requests to one URL and summarizes how that endpoint responds under pressure.

• Run quick load tests against an HTTP or HTTP/2 endpoint by request count or duration to gauge latency, throughput, and failure rates.
• Exercise specific request shapes with custom methods, headers, body data, basic auth, host overrides, proxy settings, and transport toggles such as disabled redirects or keep-alives.
• Export per-request timing and status-code data as CSV for spreadsheet analysis or follow-up parsing after a benchmark run.

• The flag surface is non-interactive and predictable, so agents can use it in CI, deploy verification, or repeatable benchmark scripts without extra prompts.
• Automation is weaker than tools with native JSON because the documented machine-readable output is CSV and the default report is human-oriented.
• Best fit for lightweight inspect-and-verify performance checks against a single URL rather than broad service management or root-cause diagnosis.

• It focuses on one-target HTTP load generation; agents need other tools for distributed testing, tracing, or deeper performance debugging.
• CSV is the only documented structured output mode, so automated thresholds usually need a parsing step before follow-up decisions.