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Ognjen Regoje
But you can call me Oggy


I make things that run on the web (mostly).
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Load testing this site with JMeter

#devops #product

A couple of days ago there was an article on HN that gained a lot of traction. Naturally it got the kiss of death and the site went down.

Since I was load-testing some calls on Supplybunny, I figured I might as well see how much traffic could this site take.

This site is hosted on a $10 DigitalOcean droplet, the main purpose of which is a WordPress installation that uses most of the resources. It is built with Jekyll, so it’s actually all static files. It has very few other assets such as images.

I set up a JMeter script that visits the home, about and post pages:

Simple JMeter setup

Simple enough.

I ran it at three different loads.

Ramp-up Iterations Threads Throughput (r/s) Median response (ms) 99% response (ms) Error rate
0s 100 100 945.6 114 291 0.00%
0s 200 1000 685.3 581 3993 0.01%
200s 400 2000 555.9 2535 4818 0.2%

2000 threads is the maximum that I could get with 16GB of ram and 12GB heapsize so I did it with double the iterations.

Overall that’s pretty good and shows just how good nginx is at serving static files.

At least for this site I don’t have to worry about bot traffic spikes.

As a side thought, I compared a load test with and without the cache controller:

  Throughput Median response 99% response
Cached 945.6 100ms 291ms
Not cached 162.3 616ms 2301ms

This definitely makes me appreciate more just how big of a difference cache makes.