
For this year, we made it our goal to have a smoothly automated system -- still based around jmeter, which we like. First, we tried BlazeMeter. It's a jmeter PaaS, which is a really cool idea and promises to take care of the infrastructure so we could focus on writing the tests. It's not bad at all, and I think we may use it in the future, but for now, the costs were higher than we wanted, there were too many limitations on usage (the price tiers control things like ramp-up time, max users etc.), and the reporting wasn't as transparent as we wanted.
Finally, we found jmeter-ec2, which is a wrapper around Amazon's API that automates launching linux micro instances, deploying resources to those instances, firing up the test, and aggregating results. It's a lightweight script that runs in a shell and eliminates the need for a dedicated controller -- instead, each generator controls its own virtual users, and the condensed results are sent back to the shell, which makes for much less traffic between the instances (therefore, no saturation). The data collected isn't as deep as with the other approaches, but for our purposes, that's okay. We're mostly interested in simply finding out how many users we can throw at the site before it crashes. Since our plan is to take over the world, our target for concurrent users is currently 7,057,131,972. Wish us luck.
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