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Took a look at Locust before and did not find it as useful or generic as ApacheBench or Httperf (by HP). Locust felt a little too cutesy and high-level for most of the work I wanted to do - which was pretty simple.

Furthermore there were a lot of timing inaccuracies between the same test runs. It certainly could have been a fault in our code, but ab and Httperf seemed to give a lot more reliable and useful timing information. And they are just simpler to use. For one, not being browserbased can be nice when you are trying to iterate quickly.

Not trying to sell anyone against Locust, but at the least, I recommend you take a look at ab and Httperf to make sure you don't need something a whole lot simpler.

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That isn't a very good comparison, because Locust's use-case is very different.

Locust is a tool/framework for writing code that simulates real user behaviour in a fairly realistic way. For example, it's very common to store state for each simulated user. Once you have written your "user behaviour code", you can then simulate a lot of simultaneous users by running it distributed across multiple machines, and hopefully get realistic load sent to you system.

If I wanted to just send a lot of requests/s to one or very few URL endpoints, I would also use something like ApacheBench, and I'm author of Locust.

If you're using ab or httpperf, you should also take a look at wrk (https://github.com/wg/wrk). It can generate significant amount of load and has support for Lua scripting for request generation, response processing and reporting.

There is another fork of it (https://github.com/giltene/wrk2) which can be used if you want test at a consistent RPS.