/load-testing

Browser load testing using k6s

Primary LanguageJavaScript

load-testing

Browser load testing the IDP using k6s

Setup

  1. brew install k6
  2. Fill Microsoft credentials to credentials.js for example script (login.js), either by
    1. Writing credentials directly to file
    2. Setting env variables, eg 
       export EMAIL="user@example.com"
 export PASSWORD="example-password"

Docs for installing k6

Background

The general flow for load testing is quite iterative and generally consists of...

  1. Identifying the user flow to load test on the website on local deployment
  2. Write a [k6] script to automate the user flow (through headful browser testing) targeting the URL for local
    1. Locating the HTML element in question action (click, type, etc)
    2. [if necessary] Editing code to create an CSS selector to interact with the element (often selectors like an aria-label etc are useful since they aren't going to be overwritten by other code)
  3. Pushing up a new image to test on a live deployment (development, staging, etc)
  4. Adjusting values to accomodate time and number of concurrent users
  5. Changing the script to target the live deployment URL

Some notes on this...

  • k6s is useful in this regard because it abstracts the number of users and time for you into a simple config
  • There's a sliding scale of attacking load testing...
    1. On one end, you could add aria-labels to everything, which requires more code changes. This runs into the problem of editing components that are possibly deep in the gen3 core or React component libraries, but will be more robust to any code changes if you are commmitting these as lasting changes.
    2. On the other end, you could hack everything based on its class names (ie Tailwind syntax in this case) which is less robust to UI changes but could allow you to run testing without pushing up a new FEF image.

Examples

  • login.js is a good example to start with, which you can run headful so you can actually see what's going on
  • dev-load-testing.js is what was used to test development (depends on frontend-framework using the dev-ids tag on development). This is scaled to multiusers and over a longer period of time through an options json in the code.
K6_BROWSER_HEADLESS=false k6 run login.js
k6 run login.js

Docs for running k6