Alibaba Cloud Performance Testing (PTS) is a commercial performance testing tool that allows you to initiate stress testing tasks on demand. PTS can support up to millions of concurrent virtual users (VUs) and tens of millions of transactions per second (TPS) and is fully compatible with JMeter. PTS provides various features, including scenario orchestration, API debugging, and traffic customization. PTS allows you to quickly create stress testing scripts to precisely simulate different levels of user access to business systems. This helps efficiently improve the performance and stability of business systems.
PTS is designed to continuously simplify performance stress testing, which allows you to focus more on your business and performance issues. In the PTS console, you can simulate complex interactive traffic that closely resembles actual business traffic at low labor and resource costs to quickly measure the business performance status of your system and facilitate performance issue identification, capacity ratio design, and end-to-end stress testing. This improves user experience, promotes business development, and maximizes the commercial values of your enterprise.
Stress testing process
PTS provides a comprehensive and efficient stress testing process. The following figure shows the process.
Stress testing process:
In the PTS console, you prepare the API data for stress testing, construct a stress testing scenario, and specify the stress load mode and level. You can start or stop the stress testing at any time or adjust the test speed during the stress testing process.
After you start the stress testing, the stress testing control center in the PTS background automatically schedules the stress testing data, tasks, and load generators.
The load generators randomly schedule Alibaba Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN) points of presence (POPs) in hundreds of cities and carriers around the world to initiate stress testing traffic. The scheduling ensures that stress testing traffic closely resembles real user behaviors in terms of factors such as the number of concurrent VUs and the dispersion of stress testing traffic and the stress testing results are comprehensive and reliable.
The load generators initiate the stress testing on specified business websites.
CloudMonitor (if integrated) and Application Real-Time Monitoring Service (ARMS) (if integrated) together with PTS collect stress testing data in real time based on various monitoring metrics.
Stress testing data is displayed in real time in the PTS console for process monitoring. After the stress testing is complete, PTS generates a stress testing report. You can identify performance issues and discover system bottlenecks based on the performance data of the stress testing scenario.
Creation methods for stress testing scenarios
The following figure shows the methods supported by PTS to create stress testing scenarios.
Notes:
PTS supports visualized orchestration developed by Alibaba Cloud without the need for technical or coding expertise. PTS uses powerful load generators developed by Alibaba Cloud to perform stress testing.
The native JMeter load generator is used to perform stress testing. PTS provides services, such as custom load construction and monitoring data aggregation. For more information, see Create a JMeter scenario.
The in-house PTS load generator provides differentiated capabilities in API-level RPS throughput stress modes, second-level startup, real-time control, scheduled stress testing, and traffic spread across global carrier networks.
Learning path
PTS V3.0 usage guide provides a sequence of courses to help you learn the basics of PTS and gain advanced knowledge.