Application and Load Testing Guidelines

Part of offering a professional experience to your customers is knowing how your applications perform and getting performance benchmarks for your Rackspace-hosted assets. This article provides some helpful application, load,
and performance-benchmarking tests to help you get useful data. It also explains your obligations when performing the tests and provides technical guidance for performing the tests.

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When you perform any testing on or against Rackspace cloud servers, you are operating under the terms of our Global Acceptable Use Policy (AUP).

Policing and enforcement

Rackspace monitors all cloud host servers for activities that reduce virtual server performance. If we find a virtual server affects another, we reserve the right to hard reboot, suspend, or switch off the impacting server. We further
reserve the right to suspend or cancel the impacting account.

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When performing the recommended application tests, load tests, and performance-benchmarking tests in this article, observe the following guidelines before and during each test and stop the test immediately if it breaches the indicated thresholds.

Load testing

Be sure to continually monitor the effects of your tests as you apply load. Before running load tests, ensure that you know how to view actual RAM, disk IO, and network usage in real time. These metrics show whether a test risks
interfering with other customers' servers on the same host. For specific thresholds, see the following Linux® and Windows® virtual server sections.

Alternatively, there are load-testing services managed with external servers located globally. For example, load testing with LoadView allows you to use their external servers and offers testing of API load or application load testing.

Linux virtual servers

Install and use the screen package for your Linux distribution to run and view the following commands at the same time. To compile the screen from the source, go to the GNU homepage.

RAM

Use the following command to view RAM usage as you perform tests:

 watch free -m

Don't let the value in the Free column in the +/- buffers/cache line go
lower than 1000.

Disk IO

Use the following command to view disk IO usage as you perform tests:

 top

Watch the %wa number in the second line. It might occasionally rise above 1.0, but it should not be above 1.0 for more than a couple of seconds.

Network usage

Use the following command to view network usage as you perform tests:

 sudo watch -n 10 -d /sbin/ip addr show eth0

Watch the RX bytes number. Every 10 seconds, the -d argument highlights any changes in this number. The 10-second pause gives you time to note the RX bytes number before it changes. You can reduce the amount of math required to calculate exact changes if you remember that at least eight digits must change—per watch -d highlighting—between each 10-second update before you need to apply any arithmetic. For virtual machines with 2 GB RAM or more, at least nine digits must change before you need to calculate the exact change.

The following table shows the maximum change in RX bytes per second by server size before exact change should be calculated:

Windows virtual servers

To view and log the performance of a Windows server as you perform load tests, you need to use the Performance Monitor.

Run the following command to start the monitor:

 perfmon.exe

This section describes some counters that you can use to ensure that you do not exceed the thresholds and affect other customers on the server. You have to change the scale of the graphs and also the counters in Performance Monitor, especially regarding memory use. If you find these graphs hard to read and track, we recommend using the resmon.exe utility to track them.

Processor use

Counter: Processor Information > % Processor Time > _Total

Purpose: Monitors CPU load as a percentage

Threshold: Don't let this counter exceed 90 percent.

Memory use

Watch the following memory-related counters during load testing:

• Counter: Process > Working Set > _Total (or per specific process)

  Purpose: Shows the current allocated or used RAM by the machine or specific application or process

  Threshold: Don't let this counter exceed 90 percent of the VM's total physical RAM.

• Counter: Paging File > % Usage > Total

  Purpose: Review this value in conjunction with Available MBytes to understand paging activity on your system.

  Threshold: Don't let this counter rise above 50 percent of the total paging size.

• Counter: Memory > Available MBytes

  Purpose: Shows free RAM available to be used by new processes in megabytes

  Threshold: Don't let this counter fall below 10 percent of total physical RAM.

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If you are unsure of the amount of RAM installed, run the msinfo32 command from the Run box.

Disk use

Watch the following disk-usage counters during load testing:

• Counter: PhysicalDisk > Disk Time > _Total

  Purpose: Shows the amount of time that the disk is active

  Threshold: 90 percent

• Counter: PhysicalDisk > Avg. Disk Queue Length > _Total

  Purpose: Validates the communication medium

  Threshold: Don't let this counter rise above 4.

Network performance

Watch the following disk-usage counters during load testing:

Counter: Network Interface > Bytes Total/sec > Network Interface

Purpose: Measures the number of bytes sent or received

Threshold: Don't let link speed rise above the Maximum PerfMon Link Speed (%) value for your server size, as shown in the following table:

Network latency testing

Remote testing can cause network latency. To test the network latency to our data centers, ping them and then review the response times or the ping returns. Each Rackspace data center has its own sandbox server that you can use for ping and other network tests. Because we host most of our cloud infrastructure in the same data centers, this test also works for cloud servers.

Ping is publicly accessible for the following servers:

• sandbox.dfw1.rackspace.net
• sandbox.iad3.rackspace.net
• sandbox.lon3.rackspace.net
• sandbox.hkg1.rackspace.net
• sandbox.ord1.rackspace.net
• sandbox.syd2.rackspace.net

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To remove DNS lookup effects, you might want to determine each test server IP address and ping the IP address directly.