This document discusses the importance of load testing software applications before launch. It introduces Gatling, an open-source load testing tool, and FrontLine, its enterprise version. Gatling aims to make load testing usable, maintainable, performant, and integratable. It uses a domain-specific language to simulate user traffic and behaviors. The document emphasizes choosing appropriate metrics for reporting, like percentiles rather than just averages, to accurately capture a system's performance under load. It concludes with a demo of Gatling's features like live dashboards and integration with continuous integration pipelines.

1. Load Testing:
Stop Crossing Fingers
When Going Live
RivieraDEV
18th, May2018
Gatling.io
@GatlingTool
Stéphane Landelle
CEO
@slandelle
slandelle@gatling.io

2. Gatling Corp
2
French (Bagneux, near Paris)
Gatling OSS editor
Professional Services
FrontLine for Enterprise users

3. AGENDA
Load Testing
Gatling & FrontLine
Demo

4. Load Testing? So What?!?!
No Time
Complicated
Honestly, what could happen?

5. Load Testing? So What?!?!
Challenges: traffic,
time-to-market
Damage brand/sales
Operating costs

6. Loading Testing: Goals
Anticipate
Reproduce
Train

7. Load Testing? How?
Who?
• Experts?
• QA, devs, DBA, ops, business?
Tools?
• provisioning, monitoring, load
injectors

8. Load Testing? When?
When I’m done developing?
ASAP?

9. Load Injector
Simulate traffic and user
behaviors
≠ « url basher» (curl, ab, wrk)
≠ web browser

10. Gatling
1. Enterprise Grade
2. Performance
3. Usability
4. Reporting
5. Integrations
Code, Analyze, Integrate

11. Enterprise Grade Solution
Open-source: Gatling
• Recorder
• HTTP, WebSocket, Server-Sent Events, Polling, JMS
Community:
• AMQP, ZeroMQ, MQTT, JDBC, Cassandra, Kafka, TCP…
• Conferences (26 in 2016)
Enterprise: FrontLine:
• Automation
• Clustering
• Live Reporting

12. Popularity
12
Top 5
3,600

13. Performance: Modern Architecture
Messaging:
Non blocking IO:

14. Performance
Ø + load for given hardware
Ø - unrealistic results

15. Usability
Unit and Integration Tests:
þ Maintenability (versioning, refactoring, peer review…)
þ Devs Involved
þ Continuous Integration
è Quick Feedback
What About Load Tests???
15

16. Maintenabilit y
16
val scn = scenario("BasicSimulation")
.exec(http("request_1").get("/"))
.pause(5)
Graphical Interface Code

17. DSL
Programming Language
JVM libraries
Maintenabilit y: Code
Checks
• regex / css / xpath / jsonPath
• find / findAll / count
• is / in / not / whatever
Structures
• doIf / repeat / during / asLongAs
• randomSwitch / roundRobinSwitch
Error handling
• tryMax /
exitBlockOnFail
Feeders
• csv / tsv / jdbc
Assert
• assertions

18. Reporting: Which Metrics?
Mean?
18

19. Reporting: Which Metrics?
19

20. Reporting: Which Metrics?
Standard Deviation?
20

21. Reporting: Which Metrics?
21
For normal distributions
ONLY

22. Reporting: Which Metrics?
22
https://www.autodeskresearch.com/publications/samestats
Same mean, same std dev

23. Reporting: Which Metrics?
23
Percentiles
Nth percentile =
value ≥ n% of the values
25th 50th 75th 100th
(max)
3 6 7 8 8 9 10 13 15 16 20

24. Reporting: Which Metrics?
24
Don’t assume distributions!
Measure!

25. Reporting: Which Metrics?
25
Beware broken implementations!

26. Reporting: Live Dashboard
26

27. Integrations / Automation
27
Continuous
Integration
Source
Control
Build
ToolsIDE
On Prem / On Demand

28. Acceptance Criteria
A ssertions
Reporting in CI
28

29. Demo Time!
29

30. Thanks &
see you soon!
Questions?
30