Squid game: how we load-tested Ably’s Control API

Hey, I'm the author of this. My team and I worked on load testing our new feature and wanted to share how we went about it. Ask me anything!

> To slow down or stop attacks, we limit requests made by a specific user / IP. [...] While that confirms that we can limit unauthorized and bad users who make too many requests, the testing failed because we also blocked the simulated good users on the same IP.

I don't understand the problem this is trying to solve. In the test setup both good and malicious actors are simulated on the same IP address (which coincidentally might also be a real world situation).

So you're trying to load test - but failing because you get throttled/rate-limited - which is good.

But how does Squid help in this case - doesn't it just mask away the actual load by caching content?

In that case are you actually testing the ControlAPI load - or how good Squid's caching is?

Aside from that - pretty interesting read. Would live to see a bit more technical detail and depth for the next blog post!

'squid game' meaning squid proxy is used in the test setup and 'game' is only in the title. maybe funny, but I think such clickbaity title is not helpful.

If anyone is interested in load testing in your language of choice using your page objects, postman, or any request-making executable, drop me a line.

I have a magical solution, and I'm looking for people to try it.

edit: thanks mcny, woops! On Gmail, I'm ebeland.