A Goose In The Clouds: Load Testing At Scale
Jeremy founded Tag1 Consulting in 2007. He has been a contributing core Drupal developer since 2002, and helped establish Drupal as a successful CMS through the early popularity of his personal blog, KernelTrap.org. Over the years, he authored and maintained the core statistics module and throttle module, as well as the pager logic and the initial Drupal 5 installer. He continues to contribute to the Drupal caching layer, offers optimizations to the bootstrap process, and maintains a high performance patchset. He actively maintains numerous Drupal modules including the spam module, the support module, the ad module, and the dba module. Beyond Drupal, Jeremy is a networking guru that has maintained the source code for a UNIX-kernel based, EAL5+ certified, commercial firewall.
Experimenting with running Goose load tests from AWS, Goose has proven to make fantastic use of all available system resources, so that it is only generally limited by network speeds. A smaller server instance was able to simulate 2,000 users generating over 6,500 requests per second and saturating a 2.6 Gbps uplink. As more uplink speed was added, Goose was able to scale linearly -- by distributing the test across two servers with faster uplinks, it comfortably simulated 12,000 active users generating over 41,000 requests per second and saturating 16 Gbps.
