Cloud

Using the cloud

LoadForge famously uses the cloud to scale up large numbers of users for load testing. We have developed a system where we can rapidly launch new cloud instances and then delete them after use.

This achieves two main goals:

  • Lower cost to our users. From $0.05 per 10,000 users on average per test.
  • Extremely high scale tests. LoadForge can generate millions of SSL transactions per second.

It also helps us to achieve another goal of ours, having as little a carbon footprint as possible.

The green load test company

Did you know LoadForge contributes 1% of all it's revenue to fighting climate change? Learn more on our climate page.

How does it work?

When you start a test, LoadForge launches brand new virtual machines to run your load test. We use DigitalOcean for this (more on the options below) and we then install all of our requirements on the system once it's available.

This process takes around 1 minute, and happens in parallel. So to launch 20 test workers also takes 1 minute.

Once your test run is finished, we wipe your data from the instance and destroy it. Your test results are then stored in our cloud.

Serverless

As a part of our effort to minimize our usage of resources, LoadForge is a fully serverless product. It has no servers and runs on AWS Lambda!

Using DigitalOcean

If you have a DigitalOcean account already, this process is made extremely simple for you. All you need to provide is an API key and we will use your cloud account for launching servers.

If you do not you have two options:

  1. Create a DigitalOcean account - this takes a couple of minutes and we provide a $100 credit you can use.
  2. Use our cloud - this is the simplest, and we bill you for usage.

Why not just use our cloud? Because it's more expensive. Using our cloud will cost around $2 per test per hour, and your own DigitalOcean account costs around 5 cents.

Our cloud is great for your first few tests though - as you get to know and use the platform. You can change your mind at any time and switch between our cloud and your own one!

Scale

We have a guide dedicated to high scale testing, but we allow you to launch up to 20 servers per test, and to run multiple tests at once.

A test can generate 10,000-20,000 users which can generate multiple requests per second, per server. This model allows millions of SSL transactions per second, all powered by disposable cloud servers.

To run a 3.2 million TPS test, which almost no load testing companies are capable of, would only cost $19.20 for a full hour - that's 11,520,000,000 SSL requests!

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