We need to know how far we can push our application before it breaks, how many users it can support, how well it scales, and where the bottlenecks are.
In this chapter, we will learn how to install the monitoring tools needed to understand how our application is performing. We will then learn how to push our application to its limit by setting up and running load tests.
We will go step by step through three different methods of load testing. We'll start with the most basic test, flooding our application with HTTP requests. We'll then advance to running more complex load tests that will mimic real-life user scenarios more closely. These methods will give us the information we need to know exactly how our application will perform and what we need to improve on to handle massive amounts of traffic.