h2load

h2load is part of the nghttp2 project and is used for the baseline-h2 profile. It supports HTTP/2 multiplexing with configurable concurrent streams per connection.

Installation

sudo apt install nghttp2-client

How it’s used

h2load https://localhost:8443/baseline2?a=1&b=1 -c 64 -m 100 -t 12 -D 5s

Flag	Description	Value
`-c`	Number of connections	64, 256, or 1,024
`-m`	Max concurrent streams per connection	100
`-t`	Threads	12
`-D`	Duration	5s

Why h2load?

gcannon is HTTP/1.1 only (by design — it uses raw request templates and io_uring for maximum throughput). h2load handles TLS negotiation, ALPN, HPACK header compression, and HTTP/2 stream multiplexing natively.