KCPHP User Group - March 2018
7 Mar 2018 at Stowers Institute

We love Web Development and all things PHP. Our meetings are often a little free-formed, but we shoot for this schedule:

6:00pm - Mingling / Meet and Greet

6:15pm - Lightning Talk: Last Month in PHP

6:30pm - David Stanley - Getting ready for scale: Load testing your API with Gatling

Well, today is the day. You've spent the last 4 months working on an API and today is the day it goes live. From unit tests to integration tests, you've put in the work and are confident the system will perform.

But... Are you sure? You haven't tested this under load yet. At what level of traffic will performance begin to degrade? What are the most expensive operations? When this thing breaks, how will it break? And what will break first? Are the thresholds for auto-scaling set up in a way that makes sense?

This is where Gatling - https://gatling.io/ - can help out. In this talk, I'll cover the basic use of this tool and how you can integrate it into a PHP project. From filling out forms to uploading files, we'll cover the basic scenarios that can give you the confidence to deploy and run an app at scale - simple operations that verify an endpoint functions as well as complex scenarios that throw thousands of requests at your system. Additionally, I'll demonstrate how to vary traffic levels and request patterns to approximate actual production usage. Finally, we'll use New Relic to gain performance insights while the test scenario is running.