web/null

web/null is /dev/null for the Web. It silently agrees with and eats up any request being VERBd to it, and keeps statistics of it.

web/null is great to use as a diagnostics end-socket of any distributed system you have, that works against another system sitting at an HTTP endpoint.

Replace any service with it, in order to have a real peek at what your other services are doing.

web/null is extremely useful (and being used) for getting stats data during stress testing a complex system.

Quick Start

clone this repository and run

$ npm install

You should then be able to run

$ node webnull
== web/null v0.0.1. I eat your HTTP. ==
* Listening on port 4000.
* Flushing to webnull.log every 10 seconds.

And now just experiment. Here is apachebench

$ ab -n 10000 -c 10 "http://localhost:4000/"

Sample output, human-readable (debug)

...
127.0.0.1 - - [Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:35:36 GMT] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/14.0.835.202 Safari/535.1"
127.0.0.1 - - [Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:35:36 GMT] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/14.0.835.202 Safari/535.1"
1320845743    51 req(total)	0 bytes(total)	51 reqs	0 bytes	5.1 req(s)	0 bytes(avg)

Sample output, CSV (webnull.log)

...
1320845743,51,0,51,0,5.1,0

Doing more

Here's how help looks like:

$ node webnull --help
Usage: webnull [options]

Options:

  -h, --help                    output usage information
  -V, --version                 output the version number
  -d, --debug                   Show when flush happens.
  -c, --canned-response [file]  Existing file name to read a response from.
  -o, --output [file]           File name to output to.
  -i, --interval [seconds]      Flush interval.
  -p, --port [number]           Port to listen on.

Contributing

Fork, implement, add tests, pull request, get my everlasting thanks and a respectable place here :).

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2011 Dotan Nahum @jondot. See MIT-LICENSE for further details.