Loader.io - a FREE load testing tool

Loader.io is a FREE load testing service that allows you to stress test your web-apps & apis with thousands of concurrent connections.

Loader.io allows you to conduct 3 types of tests in its free plan:

• You can gradually increase traffic from 0 to ‘n’ clients over 1 minute.
• You can maintain ‘n’ clients traffic per second for 1 minute. This can give a rough idea about the real-time capacities.
• You can specify a total of ‘n’ clients traffic to be maintained over 1 minute without any ‘per second’ requirements.

I have learnt about it from this article of Hi Tircks. He stresses his server, and here is how he does it.

I tested out (1) & (2) only since (3) is just a diluted version of (2). All these tests were done on this live blog itself as I wanted to keep it close to what I am experiencing.

Test 1: Gradually Increase 0 – 250 Clients Over 1 Minute

This was an entry-level test aimed at increasing traffic from 0 – 250 over a period of 1 minute. It passed the test with flying colors.

The average response time was 234ms, and there were no timeout, network, or 400/500 errors at all.

Test 2: Gradually increase 0 – 500 clients over 1 minute

This time, I doubled the traffic load, increasing from 0 – 500 over 1 minute. It breezed through this test too.

The average response time slightly increased to 257ms, and again there were no errors at all.

Test 3: Maintain 500 clients per second for 1 minute

Now I switched over to the second test and tried maintaining 500 clients constantly for 1 minute. Voila! It passed this one too!

The response time was 252ms with zero errors.

Test 4: Maintain 1000 clients per second for 1 minute

This time, I doubled it to maintain 1000 clients constantly for 1 minute. Surprisingly, it passed without any errors this time too. I was not expecting this, honestly.

Although there were no errors, the server response time increased to 381ms.

I was curious to stress the server more, but I didn’t do it as it does not make any sense, since 1000 real-time traffic is already quite a lot, and most websites are not going to experience such a traffic load constantly.