Load testing requirements¶

Testing for Cloud Platform Professional¶

Since Cloud Platform Professional application rely on shared load balancing infrastructure that is being used by other customers, and since dedicated load balancers are not available on these platforms, Acquia does not permit any volume of load or stress testing on Cloud Platform Professional in any environment (Production or non-Production). This allows us to better ensure that other customers’ applications are not impacted by any other application’s development efforts.

Cloud Platform Enterprise with shared load balancers, not yet live¶

If you are a Cloud Platform Enterprise customer with shared load balancers in front of your Production environment, Acquia offers two options that can enable you to perform load testing, assuming your Production environment is not yet live:

• Acquia can provide one test load balancer for a single four-hour window. Although there is no charge for this option, you must request this by filing a Support ticket with at least five business days’ advance notice. This option is available one time per subscription, and you will need to configure a custom domain name with your DNS provider and point it to the IP address that Acquia provides prior to the provided window. The load test cannot start before or end after the window provided; otherwise it may impact the results of other customers who have also reserved the infrastructure for that day.
• For an additional charge, Acquia can provision a pair of dedicated load balancers for a minimum period of one week. You must provide five business days’ advance notice. Contact your Acquia Account Manager to obtain more information on pricing or to make this request.

You can perform load tests on your Cloud Platform Enterprise Production environment only if you choose one of these two options. This is necessary to ensure that other customers’ live, production applications aren’t impacted by another application’s load testing. Acquia does not permit load tests on any non-Production environments on shared staging infrastructure.

Cloud Platform Enterprise with shared load balancers, live¶

If you are a Cloud Platform Enterprise customer with shared load balancers in front of your Production environment and your applications are already live, ensure that you arrange for a dedicated load testing environment that duplicates your Production environment. For more information, see dedicated load testing environment.

Testing on Cloud Platform Enterprise with dedicated load balancers¶

If you are a Cloud Platform Enterprise customer with dedicated load balancers in front of any environment, you can perform an application stress test at any time, as you first file a Support ticket and that ticket is acknowledged by Acquia Support. This advance notice gives us a chance to notify all of our technicians that a load test will take place and prevents Acquia from blocking traffic that would look suspicious if we did not know it was a test.

When you submit this request to Acquia Support, include the date and times (including the time zone) of the planned test, and also indicate whether the traffic will be either anonymous or authenticated.

If your application has not yet gone live, you can run a load test on your Production environment. After your application has gone live, consider using instead a dedicated load testing environment that duplicates your Production environment. This will provide the most accurate results possible on a non-Production environment.

Testing with a dedicated load testing environment¶

For a true load test, you should test against either your Production environment or a testing environment that duplicates your Production environment. If you are a Cloud Platform Enterprise customer who cannot perform load tests on a Production environment without impacting existing live applications, Acquia strongly recommends that you arrange for a dedicated load testing environment that duplicates your Production environment.

While load testing on standard non-Production environments may help identify general bottlenecks and issues, it is important to note that non-production infrastructure does not usually match the infrastructure in place for your Production environment, which can significantly skew your results. To achieve the most accurate results possible, Acquia can provision a dedicated load testing environment with infrastructure that is identical to what is running in your Production environment. We require five business days’ advance notice, and there will be a charge for the additional infrastructure. Contact your Acquia Account Manager to obtain more information on pricing or to make this request.

Load testing on Cloud Next¶

For applications running on Cloud Next, the options noted earlier for Cloud Platform Enterprise applications apply. However, Cloud Next doesn’t yet support the provisioning of dedicated load test environments added to your existing application.

As an alternative, until dedicated load test environments are supported on Cloud Next, Acquia will provision a new temporary application with only a Prod environment for you to test on for the desired period of time. Utilizing this environment will require you to replicate your code, database, files, and PHP settings over the the test application before it can be used. That application can be used for load testing without the risk of the test impacting your production environment.