Gatling

Gatling is a name associated with two notable technologies: a historical weapon and a modern software tool. The term is most commonly linked to the Gatling gun, a rapid-fire firearm developed in the United States in the mid-19th century, and to Gatling, a contemporary open-source load-testing framework for web applications.

The Gatling gun was invented by Richard Jordan Gatling in the 1860s. It features a rotating cluster of multiple barrels driven by a hand crank and a mechanical system that loads, fires, and ejects cartridges as the barrels rotate into position. The design aimed to increase the rate of fire while reducing the manpower required and the operator’s exposure. By distributing firing across several barrels, the gun could achieve higher sustained rates of fire and mitigate overheating relative to single-barrel weapons. Variants were produced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and saw use by various military forces, contributing to the development of later machine-gun concepts.

Gatling (software) is an open-source load-testing framework designed for developers and testers to assess the performance of web applications. Implemented in Scala and running on the Java Virtual Machine, it lets users describe scenarios using a domain-specific language that focuses on user behavior and timing. Gatling can simulate thousands of concurrent users and provides detailed metrics, including response times and throughput, with HTML reports. It supports HTTP and WebSocket protocols and integrates with common build and deployment tools to fit into continuous integration pipelines. The project is widely used for performance testing and has both community and commercial support options.