Guess How Many Users it Takes to Kill Your Site?
Update: Here's the first result. Good response time until 400 users. At 1,340 users the response time was 6 seconds. And at 2000 users the site was effectively did. An interesting point was that errors that could harm a site's reputation started at 1000 users. Cheers to the company that had the guts to give this a try.
That which doesn't kill your site makes it stronger. Or at least that's the capacity planning strategy John Allspaw recommends (not really, but I'm trying to make a point here) in The Art of Capacity Planning:
Using production traffic to define your resources ceilings in a controlled setting allows you to see firsthand what would happen when you run out of capacity in a particular resource. Of course I'm not suggesting that you run your site into the ground, but better to know what your real (not simulated) loads are while you're watching, than find out the hard way. In addition, a lot of unexpected systemic things can happen when load increases in a particular cluster or resource, and playing "find the butterfly effect" is a worthwhile exercise.
The problem is how do you ever test to such a scale? That's where Randy Hayes of CapCal--a distributed performance testing system--comes in. Randy first contacted me asking for volunteers to try a test of a million users, which sounded like a great High Scalability sort of thing to do. Unfortunately he already found a volunteer so the idea now is to test how many users it takes to find a weakness in your site.
If anyone wants test their system to the breaking point the process goes like this:
In the past test generators were fun to write, but it was always difficult to get enough boxes to generate sufficient load. Maybe you remember installing test agents on people's work computers in cubeland so tests could be run over night when everyone was sleeping?
The cloud has changed all that. Testing-as-a-Service is one very obvious and solid use of the cloud. You need load? We got your load right here. Spin up more machines and you can drive your site into oblivion, but not in a denial-of-service attack sort of way :-)
Randy has a nice write up how their system works in CapCal Architecture and Background. It's similar in concept to other distributed testing frameworks you may have used, only this one operates in AWS and not on your own servers.
Not everyone is Google or Yahoo with zillions of users to test their software against. If you are interested in testing your site please contact Randy and give it a go. And when you are done it would be fun to have an experience report here about what you learned and what changes you needed to make.
