Load testing Grant Explorer

[shavinac]

Overview

As part of productionalizing Round Manager / Grant Explorer before running alpha rounds, we want to load test our applications so we can understand how our applications behave under heavy traffic.
Specifically, we expect Grant Explorer to have the heaviest traffic / usage.

Past Efforts

On Gitcoin Passport, we tried to set up a load test of the main Passport site.
Relevant stories: passportxyz/passport#294 , passportxyz/passport#112

However, we were unsuccessful in setting up an automated load test because we were unable to automate the in-browser wallet transactions (Passport required users to sign stamps with their wallet)

Instead, we did a "manual" load test by asking the GitcoinDAO members to visit and sign up for Passport.

Unfortunately, we ran into several production issues/outages 😔 :

• During GR14, our hosted Ceramic node was not anchoring properly, leading to lost user stamps/passports. Also our Ceramic node was repeatedly exceeding memory limits and crashing/restarting. Story tracking Ceramic node related issues
• Fleek had a production issue with their internal DNS resolution, leading to users unable to use Passport (which was using a custom domain)

Possible Approaches

Test Individual Services
We could load-test individual layers of our application stack and/or talk with external services to get a better idea of how they handle load:

External services:

• The Graph: talk to the team team about load handling, run an automated load test on the hosted service API
• Fleek hosting: talk to team about load for their IPFS node and their internal DNS system. Look into plans/pricing
• Pinata IPFS service: look into plans/pricing

For the centralized QF Calculation service (that the RM/GE team will build), we could also load-test that system

• test how it handles a flood of votes -- definitely should load-test this situation to make sure we can support many simultaneous voters
• test how it handles a flood of requests for the current distribution for round(s) -- less important at the moment if Round Manager app will be the main requester for distribution info

Manual Load Testing
We could ask GitcionDAO or other large groups of people to visit Grant Explorer and vote

[vacekj]

We still need load testing of our new indexer/api.

[vacekj]

Closing as stale