Joergs rules for loadtests

In the article “Everything is content (part 2)” I discussed the problems of doing proper loadtests with CQ with respect to your CQ which gets (a bit) lower by every loadtest. In a comment Jan Kuźniak proposed to disable versioning and to restore your loadtest environment for every loadtest. Thinking about Jans contribution revealed a number of topics I consider as crucial for loadtests. I collected some of them and would like to share them.

• Provide a reasonable amount of data in the system. This amount should be kind of equal to your production system, so the numbers are comparable. Being 20% off doesn’t matter, but don’t expect good results if your loadtest runs on 1000 handles but your production system heads directly to 50k handles. You may optimize the wrong parts of your code then.
  When you benchmarked a speedup of 20% in the loadtests but got nothing in production system, you already saw it.
• When your loadtest environment is ready to run, create a backup of it. Drop the CQ loadtest installation(s) from time to time, restore it from the backup and re-run your loadtest a clean installation to verify your results. The point I already mentioned.
• Always have the same configuration in the production and loadtest environment. That’s the reason why I disagree to disable versioning on the loadtesting environment. The effect of diverging configuration may be the same as in the above point: You may optimize the wrong parts of your code.
• No error messages during loadtest. If an error messages indicates a code problem, it’s probably reproducable by re-running the loadtest (come on, reproducable bugs are the easiest ones to fix :-)). If it’s a content problem you should adjust your content. A loadtest is also a very basic regression test, so take the results (errors belong there also!) seriously.
• Be aware of ressource virtualization! Today’s hype is to run as much applications as possible on virtualized environments (VMWare, KVM, Solaris zones, LPARs, …) to increase the efficency of the hardware usage and lower costs. Doing so very often removes some guarantees you need for comparing results of different loadtests. For exmple on one loadtest you have 4 CPUs for you, while on the second one you have 6 CPUs available. Are the results comparable? Maybe they are, maybe not.
  Being limited to always 4 CPUs offers comparable loadtests, but if your production systems requires 8 CPUs, you cannot load your loadtest system with production level numbers. Getting a decent loadtest environment is a hard job …
• Have good test scenarios. Of course the most basic requirement. Don’t just grab the access.log and throw it at your load injector. Re-running GET requests is easy, but forget about POSTs. Modelling good scenarios is hard and needs much time.

Of course there are a lot of more things to consider, but I will limit myself to these points at the moment. Eventually there will be a part 2.