Effective Performance Testing to your Server with Autocannon – Tamar Twena-Stern, TestJS Summit'21

Understand the 99th percentile of your server's response time with Tamar Twena-Stern's talk on using AutoCannon for performance testing, covering concurrent users, HTTP pipelining, throughput, and more.

Key takeaways
  • Understand the 99th percentile: The 99th percentile is a key measurement in performance testing, as it represents the response time that 99% of requests take to complete.
  • AutoCannon: AutoCannon is a tool for performance testing and benchmarking that allows you to simulate HTTP requests and measure the response time.
  • Concurrent users: Concurrent users refer to the number of users that can send requests to your server at the same time.
  • HTTP pipelining: HTTP pipelining allows you to send multiple requests without waiting for the response, making it more efficient.
  • Throughput: Throughput measures the number of concurrent requests that can be handled by your server.
  • Average response time: The average response time measures the time it takes for a request to complete, but it may not accurately represent peak usage.
  • Worker threads: Worker threads allow you to execute tasks asynchronously, without blocking the main thread.
  • Event loop: The event loop is a mechanism that allows you to execute tasks asynchronously, by transferring them to worker threads.
  • Mock data: Mock data is used to simulate real-world scenarios in performance testing.
  • Node.js: Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment that is used to build scalable and high-performance applications.
  • Express: Express is a popular Node.js framework for building web applications.
  • Asynchronous programming: Asynchronous programming allows you to write code that can execute tasks concurrently, without blocking the main thread.
  • Synchronous programming: Synchronous programming blocks the main thread until a task is completed.
  • Command-line tool: AutoCannon can be used as a command-line tool to run performance tests and benchmark your application.