QA | Load Testing with K6.io
Experimenting with k6.io for Automated Performance Testing
I’m asking for early feedback on this in order to learn more.
k6 is a developer centric open source load and performance regression testing tool for testing the performance of your cloud native backend infrastructure: APIs, microservices, serverless, containers and websites. It’s built to integrate well into your development workflow and CI/CD automation pipelines.
In short, k6 is “like unit-testing, for performance”. Kicking off my test was a simple one-liner: docker run -i loadimpact/k6 run — <Checkout.js
I’m doing a proof of concept Load Test on one of our Checkout pages, and it yielded some very interesting and actionable information in a short amount of time. Here are some highlights.
- Checkout — 10 Virtual Users, over a 10 minute period
- Average 13 seconds to load the checkout page and its assets,
- Total number of 391 test iterations.
- At least 1 user encountered a 20 second wait time.
I generated a javascript test configuration using k6.io chrome plugin and used the loadimpact/k6 docker image to run it. Kinda neat. More info on this tool I’m investigating can be found here: https://github.com/loadimpact/k6
k6 is just one of the many up and coming tools that might be very useful in the near future. I also think it could be useful for us to have a plugin/helper that integrates into CodeceptJS (my favorite Test Suite Framework). The k6 js tool is free and open source but they also offer a kind of freemium tool for graphical analysis. Kinda cool.
I want to compare the usefulness of this performance-based Load tool, to something that’s already available with Puppeteer one-off performance statistics, and also the https://webdriver.io/docs/devtools-service.html I have mentioned in the past.
It looks like you can even get pretty fancy by integrating with Grafana.
More Features
- Scripting in ES6 JS: support for modules to aid code reusability across an organization
- Everything as code: test logic and configuration options are both in JS for version control friendliness
- Automation-friendly: checks (like asserts) and thresholds for easy and flexible CI configuration!
- HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 and WebSocket protocol support
- TLS features: client certificates, configurable SSL/TLS versions and ciphers
- Batteries included: Cookies, Crypto, Custom metrics, Encodings, Environment variables, JSON, HTML forms, files, flexible execution control, and more.
- Built-in HAR converter: record browser sessions as
.harfiles and directly convert them to k6 scripts - Flexible metrics storage and visualization: InfluxDB (+Grafana), JSON or Load Impact Insights
- Cloud execution and distributed tests (currently only on infrastructure managed by Load Impact, with native distributed execution in k6 planned for the near future!)
There’s even more! See all features available in k6
Are there any other Performance and Load testing Tools you enjoy using? Do you have any thoughts on what I am using here?
Now with 19 years of experience, Dan Emmons strives to make issues that seem complex, overwhelming, or insurmountable more manageable for the Team, and to provide exceptional service that exceeds clients’ expectations. For more information, contact him on LinkedIn or through Emmonspired LLC.
