Stress Testing - Open edX Platform

Site Operators
1

We’re trying to test that our load balancing deployment configuration will work with more load.

  • Does edX or anyone else use a stress testing tool to see how the platform is handling a lot of users at once?
  • It also would be helpful to know what you are stress testing as well.

Example Stress Test

  • Change the CMS > Course > Schedule & Details setting multiple times and see how fast the LMS courseware page loads. We had a scenario where we had three people changing settings for a course and that tremendously affected the LMS page load performance because all the Open edX services were running on the same EC2 instance (installed with tutor local) and CPU usage was high.

I came across this tool which looks interesting.

2

Hi Zachary,
Try using Jmeter (use the record and play function) and increase the number of threads gradually and see how your server responds under load.

3

Thanks @Fario_Consulting for indicating JMeter. What Open edX tests are you using for stress testing?

4

Are you sure it was CPU and not the database? The act of publishing writes a lot of records–particularly around scheduling information. If the number of Studio uwsgi workers is limited, the CPU usage shouldn’t bleed over into the LMS (assuming you have enough cores overall).