Scalability Testing

As more and more businesses move online, software applications have become the backbone of many organizations. However, as the number of users and data volume grows, it becomes increasingly important to ensure that these applications can handle the increased workload without any performance degradation. This is where scalability testing comes into play.

Scalability testing is the process of evaluating a software application's ability to handle increasing workload, user traffic, and data volume. By conducting scalability testing, developers can identify and resolve scalability bottlenecks, improve the reliability of their applications, and ensure that they can handle future growth.

In this post, I'll provide an overview of scalability testing and how you can get started with it.

Objectives of Scalability Testing

• To evaluate an application's ability to handle increased workload, user traffic, and data volume.
• To identify scalability bottlenecks and areas for optimization in the application.
• To provide insights into how the application behaves under different workloads and traffic patterns.
• To validate the effectiveness of performance tuning and optimization efforts.

Why do you need Scalability Testing?

Scalability testing becomes crucial when your system requires quick scaling up to handle a sudden increase in traffic. This is particularly relevant for applications such as Netflix and Hotstar. Imagine a popular show whose next season is about to be released on the platform. A surge of users will flock to the platform, and the system must quickly adjust to prevent even a single user connection from being dropped.

You can read this post from Hotstar, this post talks about the challenges faced by Hotstar, in preparing for the IPL, a large cricketing event in India. The article discusses the issues with the legacy back-end platform, which was unable to handle the spikes in traffic during such events. Hotstar had to come up with new strategies to handle the traffic and ensure that the platform remained scalable during the event.

For such applications, scalability testing becomes a necessity.

How to do Scalability Testing?

To do scalability testing you can use k6, an open-source, developer-centric load testing tool that allows developers to create and run load tests to test the performance of their applications.

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

export let options = {
  stages: [
    { duration: '30s', target: 50 }, // ramp up to 50 users over 30 seconds
    { duration: '1m', target: 50 }, // stay at 50 users for 1 minute
    { duration: '30s', target: 100 }, // ramp up to 100 users over 30 seconds
    { duration: '1m', target: 100 }, // stay at 100 users for 1 minute
    { duration: '30s', target: 0 }, // ramp down to 0 users over 30 seconds
  ],
};

export default function () {
  const res = http.get('https://your-url-here.com/');
  check(res, { 'status is 200': (r) => r.status === 200 });
  sleep(1);
}

This script sets up a test that ramps up from 0 to 50 users over 30 seconds, stays at 50 users for 1 minute, ramps up from 50 to 100 users over 30 seconds, stays at 100 users for 1 minute, and then ramps down from 100 to 0 users over 30 seconds.

During each iteration, the script sends an HTTP GET request to https://your-url-here.com/ and checks that the response status is 200. Then it waits for 1 second before sending another request.

This will simulate the traffic pattern of gradually increasing load and then decreasing load which will effectively test your scaling up and down abilities.

You can refer to k6 Docs to learn about it more.

When Scalability Tests should be run?

Scalability testing should be integrated into the CI/CD pipelines which ensures that scalability tests are run automatically whenever changes are made to the application code or infrastructure. This helps to identify performance bottlenecks and scalability issues early on in the development process, before they become critical issues in a production environment.

To get accurate results from scalability testing, it's important to conduct tests in a production-like environment, with realistic traffic patterns and system configurations.

For every check-in to your mainline, you can deploy the application to a perf-test environment (or you can create one on demand using IaC tools) and start the test execution.

How Scalability Testing is different from Load Testing?

Both are performance based testing types but the main difference between the two is that, Scalability testing is focused on measuring how well a system can scale up to handle increasing levels of traffic whereas Load testing is focused on measuring the behavior of a system under a particular load or traffic volume.

In simple words, scalability testing involves testing the system's capability to scale up or down, whereas load testing focuses on examining the system's performance under load.

Load testing is often conducted using a fixed amount of traffic, and the goal is to determine the maximum load that a system can handle before it begins to degrade in performance.

Scalability testing often involves gradually increasing traffic levels and measuring system performance at each level to identify any bottlenecks or limitations in the system's ability to scale.

Conclusion

In conclusion, scalability testing is an essential part of software development to ensure that a system can handle increased workloads and traffic without experiencing any negative effects. It helps identify the limitations of the system and enables developers to optimize and fine-tune the application to handle a larger number of users, requests, and data.

By conducting scalability testing, developers can determine the maximum load capacity of the system and assess how it responds under different traffic scenarios. This testing can also help to identify bottlenecks and optimize the application's performance, ensuring that it can scale seamlessly without impacting its overall performance and stability.

Overall, scalability testing is crucial for organizations to provide a high-quality, reliable, and scalable product to their users. With the help of advanced tools like k6, it's now easier than ever to conduct effective and efficient scalability testing, allowing developers to catch and fix issues before they impact users.