Loady

We’ll have your services crying loady, loady, loady

Status

Note: This code is very early and not ready for use.

Loady is a load testing framework. You provide a config file and a set of Node modules that simulate user activity. Loady will generate thousands of requests per second. You can estimate maximum capacity, stress test code, etc.

Installation

npm install loady

Usage

./node_module/.bin/loady -c ./tests/load_gen.js

Example Loady Script load_gen.js:

exports.config = function () {
  return {
    num_activities_per_day: 40,
    app_name: 'Foobar 5000',
    activities_dir: './lib/load/activities'
  };
};

On average, a user does about 40 activities per day. If you provide an application name it will be displayed with usage via --help. activities_dir is a path (relative to this config file) which contains different Activities – simulated user interactions.

Loady Activities

Your load testing is accomplished through a series of Loady Activities. These are simply Node modules with a startFunc function and a probability float.

Example lib/load/activities/simple.js: var common = require(‘../common’);

exports.probability = 30 / 40;
exports.startFunc = function (cfg, cb) {
  common.requestHomepage(cfg, function (err, statusCode) {
    if (err) {
        cb(err);
    } else if (statusCode >= 500) {
        cb('too much load');
    } else if (statusCode !== 200) {
        cb('error');
    } else {
        cb(null);
    }
  }
};

Which activity is run is random, but weighted by the probability. You’ll want to look at your different user activities and weight them accordingly. If they sign up for an account once per year, this will be a very low number (say 1 / 365 * 24 * 60 * 60) and if the sign in ever two weeks (1 / 14 * 24 * 60 * 60) and if they hit an active_session activity almost every time (39/40). Etc.

Loady will do the math to normalize the probabilities and make sure they all add up to 100% and scale them so that the frequency is roughly proportional over time.

As you change your application, you’ll add new activities and may want to tweak the probabilities on older activties.

Listing Loady Activities

$ ./node_module/.bin/loady -c ./tests/load_gen.js -l
available activities: well_known, provision_no_session, auth, provision

User Database

Loady uses an in-memory representation of users. If you wish to control user creation than add an Activity named signup.

Here is the simplest possible example lib/load/activities/signup.js:

exports.startFunc = function (cfg, cb) {
    var user = userdb.getNewUser();
    if (!user) {
      winston.error(".getNewUser() should *never* return undefined!");
      process.exit(1);
    }
    userdb.addNewUser(user);
    cb(null);
  };

Reading Loady Output

Average active users simulated over the last 1s/5s/60s:

0.00    0.00    0.00    4 R, 4 S (4wn 0pn)
8657.28     8657.28     8657.28     4 R, 5 S (4wn 0pn)
10832.40    9744.84     9744.84     7 R, 8 S (7wn 0pn)
17331.84    12273.84    12273.84    10 R, 12 S (10wn 0pn) (1 503s)
25997.76    15704.82    15704.82    18 R, 18 S (18wn 0pn)
38918.88    20347.63    20347.63    24 R, 27 S (24wn 0pn) (3 ERRORS!)

ADU

The first three columns give you an idea of how many active daily users (ADU) you can concurrently support. First column is on average in the last second, how many users. Similarly, the last column is averaged over the last 60 seconds.

Activities

The R column is the number of activities that are still running.

The S column is the total number of activities started in the last second.

This is followed by a list of activities still running broken down by firsta and last character of the activity name.

So for example:

8657.28     8657.28     8657.28     4 R, 5 S (4wn 0pn)

4 wake_on activities are running. One other process was completed in the last second. The typoe of the process completed is unknown, it could have been a wn or pn.

Errors

The output will also catch errors. These may be common as your app stabelizes under load. Don’t worry.

8657.28     8657.28     8657.28     4 R, 7 S (4wn 0pn) (1 ERRORS!) (2 503s)

This indicates that 1 of the activities ended in an error condition and 2 of the activities finished with a 503.

Loady Options

Adding options to loady CLI

You can override or extend the command line options for loady to give yourself hooks to your own load testing activities:

var _ = require('underscore'),
      loady = require('loady');

exports.config = function () {
  return {
    app_name: 'Foobar 5000',
    activities_dir: './lib/load/activities'
  };
};

exports.cli = function (defaults) {
  var my_help = defaults['help'].slice();
  my_help[loady.DESC_KEY] = 'Super cool load gen. Call 555-1212 for Help.';
  var my_opts = {
    help: loady_help
  };
  return _.extend(my_opts, defaults);
};

If you define a cli property which is a function that returns optimist compatible configuration in the following format:

{
    key: [SHORTCUT, DESC, FUNC],
    ...
}

Then for each key:

• alias will be called with your SHORTCUT and KEY
• describe will be called with your SHORTCUT and DESC
• if present in arguments, FUNC callback will be invoked with your the value