I try to use it last week to run 10 instances of curl against a webserver.

I was expecting something simple as 'parallel -j10 curl https://whatever' but couldnt find the right syntax in less time that took me to prepare a dirty shell script that did the same.

If you want a simple load testing tool for HTTP, use wrk2[1].

    wrk -t2 -c100 -d30s -R2000 http://127.0.0.1:8080/index.html
> This runs a benchmark for 30 seconds, using 2 threads, keeping 100 HTTP connections open, and a constant throughput of 2000 requests per second (total, across all connections combined).

Some distros include `ab`[2] which is also good, but wrk2 improves on it (and on wrk version 1) in multiple ways, so that's what I use myself.

[1] https://github.com/giltene/wrk2

[2] https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/programs/ab.html