Load Testing

It can be a common practice to put an http server "under siege" in order to test the amount of requests and responses the server can "handle". Lets do it.

Siege As Load Tester

Check out Siege's github or Siege's website.
Siege is a great cli tool for load testing against an http server. The webpage reads "It was designed to let web developers measure their code under duress, to see how it will stand up to load on the internet.".

I will not go over how to install it - check out the docs.
The goals here will be to test an http server that is running on your personal machine (laptop, desktop):

• have an http server running (see trivial servers for a few small examples)
• have siege also downloaded on the machine
• run siege commands "against" the http server

Running Siege Against An Http Server

Run the http server locally. In this example, an http server is running and listening for requests on path / on port 3000:

const expressObj = e();
const port = 3000;
const HELLO_STRING = 'Hello from the express server!'
const ROOT_ROUTE = '/'


function helloHandler(req, res){
  return res.send(HELLO_STRING)
}

// register a "handler" to listen at endpoint "/"
expressObj.get(ROOT_ROUTE, helloHandler)

// start server, register listener callback
expressObj.listen(port, serverListeningCallback)

In a terminal run a siege command:

siege -c 10 -t 5s -b http://localhost:3000

That command will...

• mimic 10 concurrent (-c) requests, a stressor on the server
• run for 5 seconds -t 5s

The output of running that command will be more than can be consumable. A BUNCH of text will get output in the terminal.
At the end, though, is a summary:

Lifting the server siege...
Transactions:		       10568 hits
Availability:		      100.00 %
Elapsed time:		        4.80 secs
Data transferred:	        0.30 MB
Response time:		        0.00 secs
Transaction rate:	     2201.67 trans/sec
Throughput:		        0.06 MB/sec
Concurrency:		        3.75
Successful transactions:       10568
Failed transactions:	           0
Longest transaction:	        0.41
Shortest transaction:	        0.00

This reveals a bit about how much traffic the web server can "handle".
There are also several ways to scale a node server (post coming soon)

(this is just to get started)