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Load testing with Locust

Swarming

Article from ADMIN 68/2022

By Matthias Wübbeling

The Locust load test tool assesses the resiliency of your infrastructure to help you determine whether it can withstand a flood of requests.

Availability is one of the three most prominent protection goals of IT security. In contrast to encryption and integrity, both of which can be ensured with cryptographic processes, availability is often ensured by access control and redundancy. However, access control in particular is rather difficult for resources that are basically publicly accessible.

To be prepared for emergencies, it is important to determine the performance of your systems to give you reliable figures on how many requests your services can handle well and at what point an overload situation will occur. In this article, I introduce you to Locust [1], a powerful tool that can simulate an incredibly large number of users.

The Right Time

Of course, you should not run a stress test against a production system, if possible. Therefore, a good idea is to run a shadow system with the same resources, connections, and software versions as the production system. If you do not yet have a shadow system, you can also test recovery from current backups when you create them. At best, this option will give you a running system in a short time and evidence that your backups are comprehensive and quickly available.

If you need to run a stress test against a production system, your best choice is to time the test when the number of regular requests is low and preferably no customers or employees will be affected. To prepare your test as well as possible so that it can be kept short, you need to redirect regular users to another system with a maintenance notice for as long as possible. The easiest way to do this is with the Domain Name System (DNS).

Set the Time to Live (TTL) of your DNS records to a very small value (e.g., in the single-digit minute range) for one to two days and then store an IP address of another server for the duration of the test to provide the

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