API load testing best practices

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Jeffrey Meisel - XFA

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Apr 29, 2015, 9:53:16 AM4/29/15
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What are some best practices for testing or modeling how scalable a government API is, and if it will be able to handle a 10x increase in usage?  (or a 100x momentary spike in usage)

I think some of the APIs used in a project I'm working on wilI not be able to handle an increased load (i.e. servers will go down) due to higher volume of users and bad actors, and I want to mitigate that risk. 

Are there tools or methods that could be applied to do this rather quickly?  (i.e. this week)  

Thanks,

Jeff

Presidential Innovation Fellow
US Census Bureau

Greg Gershman

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Apr 29, 2015, 9:58:08 AM4/29/15
to Jeffrey Meisel - XFA, us-govern...@googlegroups.com
Sure, use a load testing service. You can check out blitz.io for a quick, low cost option. I'd also check with your agency CIO to see if they have any contracts with performance/load testing companies, they can help you put together a performance/load test plan.

There are some other options that you can configure and run yourself, Bees with Machine Guns or Apache JMeter.

Greg

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Aidan Feldman - XFB

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Apr 29, 2015, 10:08:31 AM4/29/15
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Apache Bench is a nice simple one you can run from a command line:



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Aidan Feldman
Innovation Specialist, 18F (XFB)

Dan Parker

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Apr 29, 2015, 10:13:50 AM4/29/15
to Aidan Feldman - XFB, Greg Gershman, Jeffrey Meisel - XFA, us-govern...@googlegroups.com

Another great tool is SoapUI. Once you have your API test cases set up, creating a load test is an absolute breeze.

 

http://www.soapui.org/getting-started/load-testing.html

 

And you can try it out for free.

 

Regards,

Dan Parker

RIDB API team

Burns, Martin

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Apr 29, 2015, 3:03:23 PM4/29/15
to Dan Parker, Aidan Feldman - XFB, Greg Gershman, Jeffrey Meisel - XFA, us-govern...@googlegroups.com
+1 SOAPUI/LOADUI 

Very powerful, simple, and free.  

Sent from my iPhone

lindyb...@gmail.com

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Apr 29, 2015, 5:02:08 PM4/29/15
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I've seen some Swagger discussions happening in this group as well so I thought I would just let you know that the Pro version of SoapUI (SoapUI NG Pro) has additional support for Swagger that the open source SoapUI doesn't. You can import a Swagger description and use it to generate a test suite, load tests, security tests and virtual APIs. There's a free trial so you can take it for a spin if you want.

Mark Boyd

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Apr 30, 2015, 4:48:48 AM4/30/15
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I know that the team at Load Impact also offer an API load testing service: 

https://loadimpact.com/api-testing 

They have an office in SF, and their CEO Ragnar Lonn is also involved with supporting an open data initiative with the Swedish Government.

mark

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