airhacks.fm podcast with adam bien

High-Performance Load Testing

Apr 6, 2025
Francesco Nigro, a performance engineer at Red Hat and contributor to notable projects like JC Tools, dives into the significance of stress testing over traditional methods. He discusses the Coordinated Omission Problem in load testing, introducing HyperFoil as a high-performance tool that efficiently generates millions of requests with minimal resource use. The conversation explores its architecture, benefits over competitors, and the integration of automation tools like QDUP, emphasizing the importance of reliable testing strategies in enhancing software performance.
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ADVICE

Prioritize Stress Tests

  • Prioritize stress tests over system and unit tests to uncover concurrency and stability issues.
  • Focus on stress tests to detect problems that unit tests often miss, like memory leaks and IO blocks.
INSIGHT

Understanding Coordinated Omission

  • Coordinated omission skews load testing results when clients wait to send new requests until prior ones complete.
  • True latency must consider intended request times to reflect realistic user experience during server slowdowns.
ANECDOTE

Load Testing Reveals Queued Timeout

  • In a project, generating massive load exposed that queued requests timed out, causing errors not caught by normal user experience tests.
  • This revealed that zero concurrency load tests can fail to adequately stress the server to uncover real stability issues.
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