Azure Load Testing (Preview) has a limit of 250 threads per Engine Instance. Each test can only run up to 45 Engines, so the theoretical maximum number of concurrent sessions that can be run is 11,250.
I need to simulate 120k concurrent users. Is there a suitable workaround to do this with ALT?
I think it's better to contact Azure Support for the details.
In the mean time be informed that you don't need 3rd-party providers to run a JMeter test without any limits, given you have a subscription you can
kick off several virtual machines
install JMeter on these machines
run your test in distributed mode
which is pretty much what Azure Load Testing is doing under the hood
Related
I'm running three MEAN stack programmes. Each application receives over 10,000 monthly users. Could you please assist me in finding an EC2 instance for my apps?
I've been using a "t3.large" instance with two vCPUs and eight gigabytes of RAM, but it costs $62 to $64 per month.
I need help deciding which EC2 instance to use for three Nodejs applications.
First check CloudWatch metrics for the current instances. Is CPU and memory usage consistent over time? Analysing the metrics could help you to decide whether you should select a smaller/bigger instance or not.
One way to avoid too unnecessary costs is to use auto scaling groups and load balancers. By using them and finding and applying proper settings, you could have always right amount of computing power for your applications.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/working_with_metrics.html
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/userguide/auto-scaling-groups.html
Depends on your applications. If your apps need more compute power or more memory or more storage? Deciding a server is similar to installing an app on system. Check what are basic requirements for it & then proceed to choose server.
If you have 10k+ monthly customers, think about using ALB so that traffic gets distributed evenly. Try caching to server some content if possible. Use unlimited burst mode of t3 servers if CPU keeps hitting 100%. Also, try to optimize code so that fewer resources are consumed. Once you are comfortable with ec2 choice, try to purchase saving plans or RIs for less cost.
Also, do monitor the servers & traffic using Cloudwatch agent, internet monitor etc features.
I'm trying to find the optimal cloud architecture to host a software on Microsoft Azure.
The scenario is the following:
A (containerised) REST API is exposed to the users through which they can submit POST and GET requests. POST requests trigger a backend that needs a robust configuration to operate properly and GET requests are sent to fetch the result of the backend, if any. This component of the solution is currently hosted on an Azure Web App Service which does the job perfectly.
The (containerised) backend (triggered by POST requests) perform heavy calculations during a short amount of time (typically 5-10 minutes are allotted for the calculation). This backend needs (at least) 4 cores and 16 Gb RAM, but the more the better.
The current configuration consists in the backend hosted together with the REST API on the App Service with a plan that accommodates the backend's requirements. This is clearly not very cost-efficient, as the backend is idle ~90% of the time. On top of that it's not really scalable despite an automatic scaling rule to spawn new instances based on the CPU use: it's indeed possible that if several POST requests come at the same time, they are handled by the same instance and make it crash due to a lack of memory.
Azure Functions doesn't seem to be an option: the serverless (consumption plan) solution they propose is restricted to 1.5 Gb RAM and doesn't have Docker support.
Azure Container Instances neither, because first the max number of CPUs is 4 (which is really few for the needs here, although acceptable) and second there are cold starts of approximately 2 minutes (I imagine due to the creation of the container group, pull of the image, and so on). Despite the process is async from a user perspective, a high latency is not allowed as the result is expected within 5-10 minutes, so cold starts are a problem.
Azure Batch, which at first glance appears to be a perfect fit (beefy configurations available, made for hpc, cost effective, made for time limited tasks, ...) seems to be slow too (it takes a couple of minutes to create a pool and jobs don't run immediately when submitted).
Do you have any idea what I could use?
Thanks in advance!
Azure Functions
You could look at Azure Functions Elastic Premium plan. EP3 has 4 cores, 14GB of RAM and 250GB of storage.
Premium plan hosting provides the following benefits to your functions:
Avoid cold starts with perpetually warm instances
Virtual network connectivity.
Unlimited execution duration, with 60 minutes guaranteed.
Premium instance sizes: one core, two core, and four core instances.
More predictable pricing, compared with the Consumption plan.
High-density app allocation for plans with multiple function apps.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-premium-plan?tabs=portal
Batch Considerations
When designing an application that uses Batch, you must consider the possibility of Batch not being available in a region. It's possible to encounter a rare situation where there is a problem with the region as a whole, the entire Batch service in the region, or your specific Batch account.
If the application or solution using Batch always needs to be available, then it should be designed to either failover to another region or always have the workload split between two or more regions. Both approaches require at least two Batch accounts, with each account located in a different region.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/batch/high-availability-disaster-recovery
I don't manage to get over 14 msg/second with the Azure ServiceBus Standard Plan. I'm running some benchmark tests with the Azure-Sample tool that I found in this question:
The test is done with a ServiceBus resource with a single Queue and all default configurations:
If I read this correctly, you've got the maximum concurrency of one (MaxInflightReceives) with 5 receivers (ReceiverCount). Increasing concurrency and enabling prefetch on the clients will increase the overall throughput. But,
Testing should be done within the same Azure data centre. If you're testing from a local machine, you're introducing a substantial latency that cannot be avoided.
The receive mode used is PeekLock. It is slower than ReceiveAndDelete. Not suggesting to switch, but this needs to be taken into consideration as you're trading throughput for safety by using PeekLock.
The standard tier has a cap on the number of operations per second. In addition to that, your namespace is deployed in a shared environment with entities scattered in various deployment containers. Performance will vary and cannot be guaranteed. If you want to have a guaranteed throughput, use Premium SKU.
I have performed some performance tests on WSO2 APIM on both WebServices (WSDL) and Gateway interfaces. Everything went good on the gateway one, however I am facing an odd behavior when using the WebServices one.
Basically I created a test that add, change password and delete a user and run a test plan using 64 threads. At the very beggining my throughput increases a lot up until reach all 64 threads (throughput peak was 1600 req/seg). However, after that the throughput start to decrease with no reason.
All 64 threads are still active and running, and the machine hosting the wso2am reduce CPU usage. It seems that APIM is given up of handling the request even though it has threads and processors for that.
The picture below shows the vmstat result for processor (user, system and idle) and the context switch and interruptions. It is possible to cpu/context switch follows the throughput.
And the next picture illustrate the jmeter test result after at the end (after decrease throughput).
Basically what I need is a clue on what may be the reason for such behavior. I have already tried to increase the pool of threads on both wso2am and tomcat, however it has no effect. It is like the requests were not arriving at all. Even though jmeter is full of power and had already send a bigger throughput before.
I would bet that a simple configuration on tomcat or wso2 is the answer for that. Any help is appreciate.
Thanks and Regards
It may be due to JMeter not being able to send the requests fast enough, try the following steps:
Upgrade JMeter to the latest version (3.1 as of now), you can get the most recent JMeter distribution from JMeter download page
Run your test in command-line non-GUI mode. JMeter GUI can be used for tests development and/or debugging only, it is not designed for running load tests.
Remove (or disable) all the listeners during test execution. Later on you can open JMeter GUI, add the listener of your choice, load .jtl results file and perform analysis or create an HTML Reporting Dashboard out of results file
See 9 Easy Solutions for a JMeter Load Test “Out of Memory” Failure article for above points explained in details and few more tips on configuring JMeter for maximum performance and throughput
At the moment we are running our application on an AWS Beanstalk but are trying to determine the suitablilty of Azure.
Our biggest issue is the amount of wasted CPU time we are paying for but not using. We are running on t2.small instances as these have the min amount of RAM we need but we never use even the base amount of CPU time allotted. (20% for a t2.small ) We need lots of CPU power during short bursts of the day and bringing more instances on line in advance of this is the only way we can handle it.
AWS Lambda looks a good solution for us but we have dependencies on Windows components like SAPI so we have to run inside of Windows VMs.
Looking at Azure cloud services we thought using a Web role would be best fit for our app but it seems a Web role is nothing more than a Win 2012 VM with IIS enabled. So as the app scales it just brings on more of these VMs which is exactly what we have at the moment. Does Azure have a service similar to Lambda where you just pay for the CPU processing time you use?
The reason for our inefficient use of CPU resources is that our speech generation app uses lost of 3rd party voices but can only run single threaded when calling into SAPI because the voice engine is prone to crashing when multithreading. We have no control over this voice engine. It must have access to a system registry and Windows SAPI so the ideal solution is to somehow wrap all dependencies is a package and deploy this onto Azure and then kick off multiple instances of this. What "this" is I have no Idea
Microsoft just announced a new serverless compute service as an alternative to AWS Lambda, called Azure Functions:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/functions/
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-releases-preview-of-new-azure-serverless-compute-service-to-take-on-aws-lambda/
With Azure Functions you only pay for what you use with compute metered to the nearest 100ms at Per/GB price based on the time your function runs and the memory size of the function space you choose. Function space size can range from 128mb to 1536mb. With the first 400k GB/Sec free.
Azure Function requests are charged per million requests, with the first 1 million requests free.
Based on the documentation on Azure website here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/campaigns/azure-vs-aws/mapping/, the services equivalent to AWS Lambda are Web Jobs and Logic Apps.
The most direct equivalent of Lambda on Azure is Azure Automation which does a lot of what Lambda does except it runs Powershell instead of Node etc. It isn't as tightly integrated into other services like Lambda is, but it has the same model. i.e. you write a script, and it is executed on demand.
I presume by SAPI you are refering to the speech API? If so you can create Powershell modules for Azure, and they can include dll files. In which case you could create a module to wrap around the SAPI dll, and that should do what you are looking for.
If you want a full compute environment, without the complexity of multiple machines when you run. You could use Azure Batch which would be the Azure recommended way of running what you are looking for.
The cost benefit you need to evaluate would be how much quicker your solution would run against a native .net stack (in batch), and if performance is significantly degraded when run from Powershell.
Personally I would give Automation a try, it is surprisingly powerful.
There is something called "Cloud Service" in azure which allows you to run code on a pure VM. Scaling options on these include such things as CPU%, queue size, etc. If you can schedule your needs, Azure allows you to easily set up a scheduled scaler, i.e. 4 VM's from 8AM until 08:10AM, and of course, in Azure, you pay by the minute, so it could be a feasible solution.
I'd say more, but the documentation in Azure is really so great that I'd be offending them by offering my "translation" here. Checkout azure.com for more info :)