Load Testing

From the TOS:

Misuse of System Resources: Intentional misuse of system resources, including but not limited to employing programs that consume excessive network capacity or disk IO.

I guess it depends on what they would consider excessive.

Pretty sure that would qualify. The system isn't designed for you to be purposely chewing up shared resources.

Ok thanks for the feedback I will stay away from testing on my linode.

Well, I had the same question in the irc channel and the ops didn't seem to mind. I don't know. I guess the authoritative say would have to come from caker, tasaro, mikegrb, irgeek…

I'd say ask and offer do it late at night to least affect other linodes. I'm sure the admins have access to pretty graphs and stuff to give you the best time to do something like this.

A second Linode in the same data center is not a realistic test. You have a 100 Mb/s connection with almost no latency. So yes, you probably can bring a Linode to its knees with this test - but what does it really tell you?

Something like request per second of dynamic content is usually cpu bounded, so you should test it with as much network bandwidth as possible.

Get away with linux sharing resources. It's better if you try other resources to catch up with the problem.

–---------------

linux plays golf

Tests don't need to be long to give you the information you need and short, sharp bursts of high-CPU usage shouldn't hurt other people's VMs.

If you leave it running for hours at a time, I'm sure they would have a problem… But why would you need to?

you can run a perfectly valid load test in ~15 minutes. Talk to admins to find a window to do this… be clear you are not doing a STRESS test… you should have no intention of bringing the server to 100% cpu… find out your normal tx/sec rate and typical cpu that you run at now, then structure the test to incrementally step up tx/sec to see how system resources and app respond (find the 'knee' in the performance curve)… you can get a lot of information in a little time doing this, and linode admins should have no problem with these types of tests. At the end of the day this will help to identify bottlenecks and performance problems in your app and allow it to consume LESS resources, so this is a win-win for you and linode.

• Aaron