Load Testing

Load Testing

Objectives

• To gather data on the application's behavior under low, medium, and high load.

How

• Using Siege to send requests to local, staging, and production environments. Siege is a command line script that can benchmark/load test any web application by sending large amounts of requests in many different configurations as needed.

Instructions

Pre-requisites

• Install brew
  • Follow instructions in the link
• Install and have Gambit up and running
  • IMPORTANT: set MOBILECOMMONS_DISABLED=true inside your .env file to prevent sending an SMS message on each request.
• Install Siege
  • brew install siege

Methodology

We need to setup a baseline. It can easily be done by analyzing metrics in Heroku and/or New Relic. This data will give us an idea of what normal load looks like and will form the basis to define load (requests/min).

Examples of load testing Gambit

POST requests to /v1/chatbot

siege --header 'x-gambit-api-key:<API KEY GOES HERE>' --header 'Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded' 'http://localhost:5000/v1/chatbot/ POST phone=5550000001&profile_id=5550000001&args=TACOS' -c64 -t60s -d1

This command is going to attempt to spawn 64 concurrent requests (-c64) for a time period of 60 seconds (-t60s) with a delay of 1 second between request (-d1)

Result

Transactions:                       173 hits
Availability:                       95.58 %
Elapsed time:                       59.49 secs
Data transferred:                   0.03 MB
Response time:                      19.69 secs
Transaction rate:                   2.91 trans/sec
Throughput:                         0.00 MB/sec
Concurrency:                        57.26
Successful transactions:              173
Failed transactions:                    8
Longest transaction:                30.28 secs
Shortest transaction:               13.64 secs

---

POST requests to /v1/chatbot based on a file

siege --header 'x-gambit-api-key:<API KEY GOES HERE>' --header 'Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded' -f urls.txt -c1 -r 500

This command reads a \r\n delimited file named urls.txt that has 500 URLs. Each URL is of the form: http://localhost:5000/v1/chatbot/ POST phone=5550002400&profile_id=495&keyword=TACOS. This command will mimic the response of hundreds of users after a broadcast.

Result

Transactions:                       500 hits
Availability:                       100 %
Elapsed time:                       1761.86 secs
Data transferred:                   0.17 MB
Response time:                      3.27 secs
Transaction rate:                   0.28 trans/sec
Throughput:                         0.00 MB/sec
Concurrency:                        0.93
Successful transactions:             500
Failed transactions:                   0
Longest transaction:                16.14 secs
Shortest transaction:               1.28 secs