There are lots of reasons nobody has ever done a load test with a million simultaneous virtual users and computer capacity is just one of them. But with capacity on the Amazon Elastic Cloud as virtually limitless as it is, CapCal is aiming to be the first ever to accomplish this feat. There is, however, the slight problem of finding a company or individual with a sufficiently scalable website willing to be the first to actually prove it!
Do we have any takers?
Here are the details:
You will record a "happy path" through your site using the CapCal client, at most 10 or 12 pages, and upload that to the CapCal server. You will schedule a time you want the test to begin and it will ramp from 1 to a million users over 4 minutes and stay at one million for one minute. That means that several million page hits will be registered over a 5 minute period - enough to flat line most sites! The number of instances of the CapCal EC2 load agent necessary to pull this off will be calculated based on bandwidth but will be many hundreds for sure.
We'll want to make a couple trial runs beforehand, say at 50,000 and 100,000. For all I know it could take a few contenders before we find a site that can handle the load! Lots of sites handle more than a million visitors a day but not all at once!
One side benefit of doing this test is that we can see at what point either the servers start to falter or the pipe starts to clog. My guess is that for most sites that number will be 100,000 or less but that's just a guess - we won't know without actually trying! We'll do it in the wee hours, of course, so has not to disturb anything.
If you are interested, please leave a comment here or send an email to info@capcal.com.
Hi there
ReplyDeleteHere in Brazil the IRS is done almot only via web. And they claim that they received 24/25 million declarations. Every year there's a pressure to don't leave to the very last days to send it to the IRS, because they can have problems to receive it... so I guess that they can be a good lead. so next year they can be more open in terms of time for the citizens...
Mauricio Medina
Mauricio that's a great idea - maybe the IRS here in the states would want to give it a shot!
ReplyDeleteHey Randy - I ran a 1 Million User load test with LoadRunner back in 2000. Even you should remember when Mercury Interactive tested 3COM's "Planet Project" (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2000_Oct_4/ai_65726413/).
ReplyDeleteI'll be impressed when we hit 100M, and then 1Billion vusers. But then - the traffic from the test will probably be more than the entire internet in 2011. :)
Hey Mark,
ReplyDeleteWow, that's phenomenal! Thanks for posting this. Did you read about that "super bot" with over 4 million zombies in it? Too bad the future of load testing seems to be in the hands of the bad guys. Ironic that the tool most of them use is nothing but a load testing system adapted to send out spam and attack web sites.
Thanks
Randy