Performance Testing

# Windows (using chocolatey)
choco install k6

# MacOS
brew install k6

# Linux
sudo gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring /usr/share/keyrings/k6-archive-keyring.gpg --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys C5AD17C747E3415A3642D57D77C6C491D6AC1D69
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/k6-archive-keyring.gpg] https://dl.k6.io/deb stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/k6.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install k6

k6 version

import http from "k6/http";
import { check, sleep } from "k6";

export const options = {
  stages: [
    { duration: "3m", target: 100 }, // Gradually increase to 100 users in 3 minutes
    { duration: "5m", target: 100 }, // Maintain 100 users for 5 minutes
    { duration: "2m", target: 0 },   // Decrease to 0 in 2 minutes
  ],
  rps: 200,                         // 200 requests/second
  thresholds: {
    http_req_duration: ["p(95)<500"], // 95% requests under 500ms
    http_req_failed: ["rate<0.01"],   // Error rate below 1%
  },
};

export default function () {
  const BASE_URL = "http://<YOUR_ALB_DNS>/"; // Replace with your IP:PORT or ALB DNS

  // Test homepage
  const response = http.get(BASE_URL);

  // Verify response
  check(response, {
    "status is 200": (r) => r.status === 200,
  });

  sleep(1);
}

# Save script to test-performance.js
k6 run test-performance.js

import http from "k6/http";
import { check } from "k6";

export const options = {
  stages: [
    { duration: '1m', target: 100 },    // Gradual increase
    { duration: '2m', target: 100 },    // Maintain stable
    { duration: '1m', target: 0 }       // End
  ],
  rps: 200
};

export default function () {
  http.get("http://<YOUR_ALB_DNS>/");
}

import http from "k6/http";
import { check, sleep } from "k6";

export const options = {
  stages: [
    { duration: '3m', target: 500 },    // Sharp increase
    { duration: '5m', target: 500 },    // Maintain high load
    { duration: '2m', target: 0 }       // End
  ],
  rps: 1000
};

export default function () {
  // Heavy computation
  let result = 0;
  for(let i = 0; i < 100000; i++) {
    result += Math.sqrt(i);
  }

  // Concurrent requests
  const response = http.get(BASE_URL + "/");

  check(responses, {
    "status is 200": (r) => r.status === 200
  });

  sleep(0.1);
}

- Response time too high in both tests
- Waiting time is the main bottleneck
- Throughput doesn't scale with VUs
- p90/p95 show unstable performance

Resolved:
- Load processing bottleneck ✓
- Response time spikes ✓
- Connection wait time ✓
- Scalability ✓

- ALB+ASG improved overall performance by 18.7%
- Reduced maximum response time by 81.8%
- System is more stable and reliable
- Ready for scaling
- However, this test was only at basic level, only using ALB and not yet reaching Auto Scaling usage. In the next section, let's examine performance at heavy load to see results after using Auto Scaling.