Presented in QAOTH 2023

1. Chihuahua
-sized load testing

2. Whoami?
qLeandro Melendez
qAdvocate @Grafana k6
qSeñor Performo @srperf
qPerfBytes
qYoutube
qBook

3. Gracias, amigos!

4. Summmmmary
vPerf and puppies
vLarge Vs Small
vChihuahua Tips

5. Perf Pups

6. Other pups
You may remember me from such…
https://www.srperf.com/functional-vs-performance-test-cases/

7. Changes

8. Now...

9. Building Living
and

10. Smaller & Moving

11. Giant pup…

12. Smaller & Moving

13. Smaller & Moving

14. Must
Choose

15. Large v Small

16. What do I really Mean
BALT
Chihuahua

17. BALT
Big Ass Load Test

18. All terrain
Multi protocol!

19. BALT
Heavy Requirements

20. Only the owner
Privileged
Licenses
Knowledge
Permission
Skills

21. Huge
walks
Multi-step test cases, do all!

22. Drags everything
Environments, processes, pipelines, etc.

23. Heavy
Load, load, load!

24. Chihuahua-size
Small
Cute
Manageable
Friendly-ish
Yo quiero
performance
test

25. Tiny and light
Wont kill anyone
Manageable . . . . . .. . .
Unnoticeable .. . . . . .. . .
Small SW too!

26. Work well
Focused, straight, show ROI

27. Fast n Snappy
Don’t need many resources
Happy
Tiny length
Repeatable
Stable
Small loads

28. Pipeline
Easy to include in

29. Standard protocols
HTTP mostly

30. Avoid weird ones
Heavy when you want load

31. Shareable!
Friendly
For
The
Whole
team
Anyone
To
Work
on
Play with each other

32. Load!
Can be put together!

33. Serious talk
Huge load tests (BALT)
• Heavy
• Disruptive
• Weird in elastic envs
• Questionable in most cases
• Results don’t last long
• Code/Env freeze
• Need special ppl/resources
• Hard to integrate agile
• Increase cloud costs
• Only when needed
Mini load tests (Chihuahua)
• Light n lean
• Hardly noticeable
• Pulse of the solution
• Continuous and pipelines
• Results update frequently
• Run them everywhere no freeze
• Easy for whole team
• Agile create, update, run
• No impact
• Always, on every environment

34. Subset of cloud load tests
Number
of runs
Duration (mins)

35. Mini Tips

36. Stop the
obsession
- You live in an apartment
- It is tiny and moving
- Lots of people in, moving
- Huge food and 💩
- Time requirements
- Could kill envs

37. Smaller
Is better
- Chihuahua first
- Little resources
- Wont kill anyone
- Purseable (pipelines)
- Can play inside (prod)
- Shareable n’friendly

38. Enter the
Pyramid

39. It is 3d
Automation Load

40. sniff everything
Tiny & continuously outside the pipeline

41. Keep smells
For future use, comparisons & observability

42. Don’t have to sniff
everything
Small load for what is in the release

43. Avoid huge in pipelines
Slow, Heavy, Risky, impactful, etc.

44. Don’t stop the pipeline
Slow, Heavy, Risky, impactful, etc.

45. need No huge
. . .almost
Chihuahua is enough
Rarely
Need
Huge
Huge
So
2000’s

46. Light
Keep lean: runs, sw, reqs.

47. Friendly loads-scripts
Accessible to the whole team

48. When you need
BALT
You may meet Taylor Swift

49. When you need
BALT
You have many chihuahuas, stack them
… but not in the pipeline

50. Gotta go!
But there is much more…

51. Gracias!

52. Q&A
@SrPerf FB TW YT
Leandro Melendez LI