Load Testing ISO, LiveShopping

This repo is used to collect special load-tests for artillery which can be used to load test our ISO platform.

It contains a fork of artillery.io which is used to integrate a custom engine for artillery called wsgql - it is an engine to test "Apollo Subscriptions" trough "WebSockets". It is basically the same engine as the original "ws" of artillery, but with the custom "apollo graphql" protocoll on top of it -> see the part of ws.on('open', function() { in core/lib/engine_wsgql.js 😉

How to use

1. cd into directory <this-project-dir>/artillery and run npm install
2. still in the directory <this-project-dir>/artillery run npm install -g to install this special fork globally (remove any existing artillery package by npm remove -g first ☝)
3. To test against "graphql websockets", the websocket server (GraphQL.Subscriptions) must be running and you have to know the target url (wss://) - make sure to change the address in any artillery-tests/load.test.ls.wsgql.yaml before running!
4. Make sure you know what you do - be ready on the target system to measure the load and be also ready to terminate the test immediately if anything goes wrong ctrl + c
5. Now you are able to run the special load test for the engine "wsgql" by changing into <this-project-dir> and run artillery run artillery-tests/load.test.ls.wsgql.yaml

Report

• Run artillery run -o report.json artillery-tests/load.test.ls.wsgql.yaml to generate a report file of the test!
• Afterwards, run artillery report report.json to render the report as nice HTML view!

Available tests

Raw HTTP

To test a regular website user there is the test artillery-tests/load.test.ls.http.yaml. It fires the initial GET request to load the route /de/LiveShopping/<id> - this will include the server-side-rendering, initial GQL requests on the server and so on our ISO/GQL/Monolith/DB/Cache Layer. To further simulate a real browser user, we fire additional POST requests against our graphql endpoint and logging the json results.

With this test, we have a behavior which is very close to a real browser user and generating load troughout the whole application. The only requests we don't make are the ones against static.digitecgalaxus.ch which are all driven by Akamai (all static images, scripts and styles), we don't need to test Akamai too in this scenario.

Websockets GraphQL

As our new LiveShopping solution is integrating an Apollo GQL Subscription which is driven trough websockets - we want to test this layer too! This is a feature where we can push new data for live-shopping real-time to connected clients (no reload/F5 triggering needed anymore!).

As this is a new layer for our architecture - we want to make sure we can handle this load too! So we have written a special load-test which is utilizing these websockets too to simulate a full live-shopping experience a user would have.

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Final thoughts

To simulate a full load of a live-shopping route, we must run both tests:

• artillery-tests/load.test.ls.http.yaml to test the raw HTTP load
• artillery-tests/load.test.ls.wsgql.yaml to test the raw WebSocket load

ArrivalRate / RampUp

The initial section of the artillery tests will include the config about the arrivalRate/rampUp to control how many users/connection over a certain amount of time will arrive during the test.

config:
  target: 'some-url'
  phases:
    - duration: 60
      arrivalRate: 5
    - duration: 120
      arrivalRate: 5
      rampTo: 50
    - duration: 600
      arrivalRate: 50

  ...

See artillery.io docs for further information

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