Testing the load in the infrastructure

Now that we've talked about the various ways to scale out your infrastructure, you will probably find it useful to know how to throw tests at your infrastructure to test its ability to handle the load that will be thrown at it.

Using the minionswarm.py script

The minionswarm.py script was originally used to test the performance of execution modules as they were written. But while it is still used for that today, it can also be used to test the performance of a state tree against a large number of minions.

Note

The minionswarm.py script does not ship inside any of the Salt packages, but it can be downloaded from the tests/ directory in Salt's GitHub repository at https://github.com/saltstack/salt.

The minionswarm.py script is designed to create a user-defined number of minions, which can then accept commands from the master. Keep in mind that this script will only run on a single host, so it won't help much in testing syndic architecture. However, it will...