Is it possible to specifiy an execution that only waits for the response header in reply to a post request before continuing with the next execution in the scenario?
My test returns a large json body in the response that for the purposes of the performance test i don’t need gatling to wait until it has been completely downloaded / parsed.
No, that’s not possible. Gatling aims to mimic real users/clients, and those would fetch the whole response. If you want to increase the load, just throw more users.
Note that if you don’t perform any check on the response body, the default behavior is that body chunks will be discarded.