#What This is a playground for trying out artillery, a load-testing framework in Node.js.

#Why Having used Gatling at work, and having struggled a bit with Scala, I was looking for an alternative in Node.js.

loadtest is good, but it's more of a replacement for ab, and can only test against individual URLs.

Artillery can run scenarios - refer to the documentation for more details.

The fake service

Install dependencies with npm install

This project sets up a demo service, defined in the fake-auth-service folder. Start it:

PORT=4567 node fake-auth-service/index.js

This service exposes two endpoints:

If the provided username and password are the same, returns status (200 OK) and a JSON response with userId and sessionToken.

e.g. curl -v http://localhost:4567/authenticate?username=akash&password=akash will return

(200 OK)
{
    "sessionToken": "session_4137",
    "userId": "user_akash"
}

The generated sessionToken is added to an in-memory list and can then be used with the /session/keep-alive endpoint.

If the username and password are not the same, we get back a 401 Unauthorized.

e.g. curl -v http://localhost:4567/authenticate?username=akash&password=notakash

If the session exists, echos back the provided sessionToken with a (200 OK) response code.

e.g. curl -v http://localhost:4567/session/keep-alive?sessionToken=session_4137 returns

(200 OK)
{
    "sessionToken": "session_4137"
}

If the session does not exist, we get back a 401 Unauthorized

The load testing

Once you have the fake service running, in another terminal, run the load test:

./node_modules/artillery/bin/artillery run happy-path.json

Take a close look at [happy-path.json] for what actually runs, but the gist is that it runs a load test on a scenario, where the scenario is: