This post is about Kafka and the process I have been through recently writing a performance test for an application that subscribes to messages from this technology. The test I ended up with was in the end very straightforward but there were several hurdles that took a while to resolve. I hope that reading this post will hopefully help you avoid them.

Have you abandoned a web service, because it took too long to load? I bet you have, everyone does that every now and then with slow applications. There are a lot of services to check load times, but is it the only thing to check about website’s performance worldwide? Certainly not! It is just one thing to check, not the only one. You may have performance tested the service locally and validated that everything works just fine.

I used the K6 load testing framework to benchmark the Compute Engine f1-micro and Caddy web server hosting this site. With CloudFlare caching turned off, the server was able to serve an onslaught 800 virtual users continuously reloading the page (while maintaining a median request duration of <400ms), but started dropping requests when increasing the load further. This is fine.

Apache JMeter is a Java open source tool. If you want to run load or performance tests using Apache JMeter, you can use their Graphic User Interface (GUI) and you don’t need to know any programming language, follow the JMeter documentation and you are ready to go to design your API testing scenarios.

Socrates preached, “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” This ancient Greek anecdote applies to your modern Apache Kafka project: developers, go forth and load test your real-time application to understand the capacity and limitations of your project before deployment. Failure to do so will cost you time and money (e.g. Robinhood’s outage on a historic trading day). Load testing your real-time applications has three main objectives.

E-commerce is growing globally, forecasts for 2020 promise it to reach over 4 trillion USD and over 4.2 billion USD for retail e-commerce. We are approaching a very special season for online retail business owners: Black Friday, Cyber Monday and preparing for the holiday season. Every team behind an e-commerce business is planning big for this time. Every online store will try to attract as much traffic as possible. Are you planning to do the same?

In this tutorial, we will look into how to integrate performance testing with k6 into your GitLab setup. By integrating performance tests into your CI pipelines, you can catch performance issues earlier and ship more stable and performant applications to production.

In this tutorial, we will look into how to integrate k6 tests into CircleCI. By integrating performance tests into your CI pipelines, you can catch performance issues earlier and ship more stable and performant applications to production.

“JMeter is old technology”, I hear this a lot. “Let’s use this tool or that tool instead of JMeter as it’s the latest”, I hear this a lot. “We need a lightweight tool without the GUI interface to write our tests as that will make us more agile”, I hear this a lot.