Protocol for a Total System Test to Simulate a Traffic Surge
If CQ/AEM is used to host a news website, a total system test must mimic a significant, international news event such as a political leader getting assassinated or a sovereign country invading another.
Here’s one protocol to follow - this testing is disruptive/destructive and therefore should only be conducted on cloned instances or STAGING instances that are backed up:
1) Using ToughDay, run a WCM workload against the “author” instances to mimic news editors feverishly creating and publishing new news content
java -Xmx1024m -Dhostname=yourcqserver.domain.com -Dport=4502 -Duser=jayan -Dpw=password -DcreatePages.toplevels=600 -DcreatePages.sublevels=1 -DcreatePages.subsublevels=1 -DcreatePages.concurrentUsers=10 -DcreatePages.rampup=1 -DcreatePages.thinkt=2 -DcreatePages.activate=true -DcreatePages.delete=true -jar toughday-6.0.jar createPages
2) Using ToughDay, run a DAM workload against the “author” instances to mimic the loading of images by content editors
java -Xmx1024m -Dhostname=yourcqserver.domain.com -Dport=4502 -DuploadImage.count=1000 -jar toughday-6.0.jar uploadImage
3) Using ToughDay, run a DAM workload against the “author” instances to mimic the loading of PDF documents by content editors - the resulting workflows really tax the system under test
java -Xmx1024m -Dhostname=yourcqserver.domain.com -Dport=4502 -DuploadPdf.count=8000 -jar toughday-6.0.jar uploadPdf
4) Using a web load testing tool (NeoLoad, SOASTA, LoadRunner, SilkPerformer, WebLOAD, JMeter) load up the Dispatchers/“publish” instances with 100s of 1000s of page requests. In Adobe Managed Services, we use our internally developed tool Minions.
The above four operations should ideally be run concurrently from four separate remote instances, so that their network interfaces are not saturated.
The CQ/AEM system should NOT crash or become unavailable.
For cloud deployments, the four load generators should also be in the cloud - otherwise you’ll just end up saturating your own company’s network infrastructure (NAT, firewalls, VPN etc).