For most applications, load and stress testing should be an integral part of development. By sending a predetermined amount of simulated traffic to an application, you can pinpoint slow pages using application monitoring tools (such as New Relic), identify bugs in your code, and determine if your existing infrastructure can withstand normal or elevated traffic levels. Whether you can perform load and stress testing on your application on Cloud Platform depends on your subscription level.
This page describes the different Cloud Platform Enterprise infrastructure requirements for load testing, based on your subscription:
Cloud Platform Enterprise with shared load balancers (Production environment is not yet live)
Cloud Platform Enterprise with shared load balancers (live Production environment)
Cloud Platform Enterprise with dedicated load balancers
After you have reviewed the requirements, see Load testing for information about how to prepare for and carry out load testing on Cloud Platform Enterprise.
Definition: Load testing versus stress testing
A true load test can be performed only with the infrastructure and configuration that matches your application’s Production environment. You cannot expect to get the same results by running test traffic against a Staging environment. That said, if it is not possible to perform a load test, due to reasons of cost or other resources, an application stress test that runs a significant load of test traffic on a Staging environment can still help identify bottlenecks and other performance issues.
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.
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 create 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.
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.
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 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. To get pricing information, contact your Acquia account manager.