In an extensive test scenario, the Akamai Performance Engineering Team directly compared a customer’s production system to a delivery via the Akamai CloudTest platform. System environment, details and domain information were anonymised. The report, available below as a free download, contains extensive data and metrics on the behaviour of the two systems in direct comparison when under different load distributions.
Excerpts from the report:
OBJECTIVES/GOALS
The test was designed to measure system performance and scalability, while monitoring response time metrics as user concurrency increases over time. This includes:
• Determine system scalability and performance while increasing user concurrency over time
• Determine system response times while increasing user concurrency over time
• Measure the impact of commercial load spikes on system performance while operating at peak load
TEST SCENARIOS
Nine test scenarios were created:
1) Scenario 1: 46% of Load 6) Scenario 6: 33.3% of Spike
2) Scenario 2: 24% of Load 7) Scenario 7: 3,000 Users
3) Scenario 3: 13% of Load 8) Scenario 8: 66.6% of Spike
4) Scenario 4: 17% of Load 9) Scenario 9: 33.3% of Spike
5) Scenario 5: 66.6% of Spike
RESULTS
What we learned:
• Load is unable to scale effectively to peak base load without performance degradation
• The majority of issues occurred on the xxxxxx domain along with two xxxxxx domains
• The majority of the error types were HTTP 504, 502, 404, and 400
Download the full report: PDF, English, 19 pages
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