Conducting a load test

Pointing load test traffic to Acquia¶

You cannot use the Acquia load test IP directly. You must route traffic for a domain in the Acquia Prod environment to the load test IP through public DNS or through a HOSTS entry. You can use Acquia’s default domain or any other domain that is added to the Domains list for the Prod environment in the Cloud Platform dashboard. Blazemeter provides a HOSTS override feature directly from the test dashboard. You can add an IP and domain, and your test traffic uses the designated mapping without needing a public DNS rule. For more information, see Blazemeter: DNS Override.

Creating a load test script¶

To use a JMeter-based load test platform, you must have a jmx file, which is a scripted representation of the load test scenario. The jmx file can be created by using JMeter. You can install and configure the Blazemeter module on the website.

Calculating load test volume¶

You must ensure that the load test traffic volume is as exact as possible. For information about hits per second in Blazemeter, see Blazemeter: Calculating Hits Per Second.

Acquia does not recommend that you compensate for a lower number of available concurrent users with a greater request rate. For various reasons, this approach yields an invalid test result. If the free Blazemeter offering does not meet your needs, you can upgrade the Blazemeter subscription or use another load generation tool that can support the desired traffic.

Blazemeter error rates and keep-alive¶

If a page contains resources that time out when using Blazemeter, you might get a high error rate in Blazemeter reports.

Workaround:

Update the value for the use_keepalive parameter in the jmx file from true to false by using the following code:

<boolProp name="HTTPSampler.use_keepalive">false</boolProp>                    

Typically, the actual request is returned as expected from the Acquia infrastructure. Setting the value to false provides a better understanding of the actual error rate from the website.