from Hacker News

Ask HN: Do you load-test?

by Bladtman on 11/22/16, 11:12 AM with 6 comments

The most cursory google search reveals tonnes stress testing options, ranging from simple http-request tools, to distributed networks of servers to act as clients, available for rent.

Do you perform load-testing on your services? If so; How, and what are your experiences/2 cents on the issue?

  • by ajeet_dhaliwal on 11/22/16, 1:19 PM

    I did this a couple of years ago to load test and stress a public web service. We used the results to determine how many servers to launch with and how many requests per second we would be able to handle with adequate response times. We were also able to measure improvements due our optimizations.

    At the time, due to the company I worked at it, and because the service itself was a C#/.NET service it made sense to be writing tests in C#/.NET using Microsoft's Visual Studio Test Framework. Visual Studio, I think starting from the 2013 version has a built in load testing capability that integrates with Azure (you have to create an account) that will automatically spin up instances temporarily for you in order to load test the endpoint(s) you specify using the parameters you provide in VS created web tests. It worked rather well for us. I understand this is highly specific to our use case but if you didn't know this existed it's something to be aware of.

  • by yeraydarias on 11/23/16, 10:01 AM

    We made some stress tests in the past and it is quite useful.

    We did it with Gatling (a very known tool in the Java world) in some of our local machines requesting our machines in Amazon EC2.

    As it was commented previously, the test depends on various points, to tell a few: * Do you want to test a complete web or just a few services? * The speed of your system depends on the number of instances or there are other points to look like the database connection? * Do you want to test vertical scale or you want to know about the horizontal scaling too?

    We did the tests mainly to know the "breaking point" of our database that was our "weakest link".

    Anyway, stress tests are quite useful and give you an idea about how much your system can scale and helps to detect where to improve code before expending too much money in servers.