---
title: Vaadin Scalability Testing With Amazon Web Services
order: 52
layout: page
---

[[vaadin-scalability-testing-with-amazon-web-services]]
Vaadin scalability testing with Amazon Web Services
---------------------------------------------------

This article explains how you can test the scalability of your
application in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. The AWS services
used in this article include http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/[Amazon Elastic
Compute Cloud] (EC2) and http://aws.amazon.com/rds/[Amazon Relational
Database Service] (RDS). The use of
http://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/[Amazon Elastic Load
Balancing] (ELB) is also briefly discussed. The application under
testing is called QuickTickets, a fictional Vaadin web application that
sells movie tickets to theaters all over the world. See also the
https://vaadin.com/blog/vaadin-scalability-study-quicktickets[blog
post about the experiment and the results].

To fully understand this article and follow through the steps, you
should have some basic knowledge of Amazon Web Services (AWS),
http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/[Apache JMeter], MySQL and Linux shell
usage. You will also need to know how to checkout the
http://dev.vaadin.com/svn/incubator/QuickTickets/trunk/[QuickTickets
project] from SVN and run http://ant.apache.org/[Ant] targets to
generate test database and to package the application as a WAR file.

Please notice, that using the AWS services discussed here will incur
some expenses.

[[setting-up-the-amazon-rds-database]]
1. Setting up the Amazon RDS database
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

* Login to http://aws.amazon.com/console/[AWS Management Console] and
select the Amazon RDS tab.

* Click the Launch DB Instance button.

* Select the following properties for the DB instance:
** DB Instance Class: db1.m1.large
** Multi-AZ Deployment: No
** Allocated Storage: 5 GB
** DB Instance Idenfitier: `quicktickets`
** Master User Name: `quicktickets`
** Master User Password: `<your-password>`
* Additional configuration:
** Database Name: `quicktickets`
* Management options:
** Backup Retention Period: 0 (disable backups)

* After the DB instance is started up, connect to the database with the
MySQL client.
** If this is the first time you are using Amazon RDS, you need to setup
the DB Security Groups.
** More information about http://aws.amazon.com/rds/faqs/#31[network
access to you DB instances].

* Once you have connected to the DB, run the following
command: `alter database quicktickets charset=utf8;`

* Note that the following steps might be a bit faster to do in an EC2
instance in the same zone as the RDS database. But you can of course do
these in your local machine as well.

* Take a checkout of the QuickTickets application project from the
http://dev.vaadin.com/svn/incubator/QuickTickets/trunk/application/QuickTickets/[SVN
repository].

* Create the database schema by running the
http://dev.vaadin.com/svn/incubator/QuickTickets/trunk/application/QuickTickets/db/createSchema.sql[QuickTickets/db/createSchema.sql]
file to the quicktickets
database.`mysql -uquicktickets -p<your-password> -h<db-instance-endpoint>.rds.amazonaws.com < QuickTickets/db/createSchema.sql`

* Create a huge test data by running Ant target
`create-huge-database-script` of the
http://dev.vaadin.com/svn/incubator/QuickTickets/trunk/application/QuickTickets/build.xml[QuickTickets/build.xml]
script.`cd QuickTicketsant create-huge-database-script`

* This target will generate a huge SQL file (500MB) into a temporary
directory containing loads of test data. The location of the file is
printed to the console by the Ant target.

* Run the resulting `quickticketsdata.sql` file to the quicktickets
database (this will take quite a while, well over an
hour). `mysql -uquicktickets -p<your-password> -h<db-instance-endpoint>.rds.amazonaws.com < /tmp/quickticketsdata.sql`

[[setting-up-ec2-instances-for-quicktickets]]
2. Setting up EC2 instance(s) for QuickTickets
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

* Login to http://aws.amazon.com/console/[AWS Management Console] and
select the Amazon EC2 tab.

* Click the Launch Instance button.

* Select Community AMIs tab and search an AMI with following id:
`ami-fb16f992`

* Launch a large instance of the AMI. Consult the
http://aws.amazon.com/documentation/ec2/[Amazon EC2 documentation] for
more details on how to launch a new instance.

* Login to the started instance as root via SSH.

* Copy and execute the
http://dev.vaadin.com/svn/incubator/QuickTickets/trunk/installationscripts/webserver-memcached.sh[webserver-memcached.sh]
installation script as the root user. This script will setup
http://memcached.org/[Memcached] and http://tomcat.apache.org/[Apache
Tomcat].

* Repeat the above procedure for all the instances you want to setup.

[[deploying-the-quicktickets-application]]
3. Deploying the QuickTickets application
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

* Take a checkout of the QuickTickets application project (if you
haven't already) from:
** http://dev.vaadin.com/svn/incubator/QuickTickets/trunk/application/QuickTickets/

* Add the *Private DNS* of all the instances you have setup to the list
of Memcached servers in the `WebContent/WEB-INF/servers.xml` file with
the default Memcached port 11211. For
example: `<!-- Memcached servers --&gt;<value>ip-11-111-11-111.ec2.internal:11211</value><value>ip-22-222-22-222.ec2.internal:11211</value>...`

* Create a file called `build.properties` to the root directory of the
project (right next to the `QuickTickets/build.xml`). Set the
`productionMode` property to `true` and add your Amazon RDS database
configuration details to the file. For example:

....

# Debug or production mode?
productionMode=true

# Database configuration
database.url=jdbc:mysql:<db-instance-endpoint>.rds.amazonaws.com:3306/quicktickets?characterEncoding=utf8&useCompression=true
database.username=quicktickets
database.password=<your-password-here>
database.driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
....

* Run the `package-war` target of the `build.xml` to compile and package
the WAR file (resulting in the `build/ROOT.war` file).`ant package-war`

* Deploy the WAR file into all EC2 instances you just created by copying
the `ROOT.war` into `/opt/apache-tomcat/webapps` directory.

* Now you should be able to access the application through your web
browser by opening the following
URL: `http://<instance-public-dns>.amazonaws.com:8080/app`

* If you did setup more than one instance, you could create an Amazon
ELB load balancer and attach all instances to that load balancer.
However, this makes the JMeter testing close to impossible as the ELB
doesn't scale to sudden increases in traffic fast enough and starts
dropping connections.
** More information:
https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=130622&tstart=0
** More information:
https://wiki.apache.org/jmeter/JMeterAndAmazon

* If you still want to try using ELB, you should add
`-Dsun.net.inetaddr.ttl=0` to the JMeter JVM args and use the following
settings with the ELB:
** Port Configuration: 80 forwarding to 8080
** Enable Application Generated Cookie Stickiness for cookie name:
`jsessionid`
** Set the Health Check port to `8080`
** Ping Path: `/VAADIN/ticket.html`

[[setting-up-ec2-instances-for-jmeter]]
4. Setting up EC2 instance(s) for JMeter
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

* Launch and login to a new EC2 large instance (using the AMI
`ami-fb16f992`). See the first 5 steps of the second chapter.

* Copy and execute the
http://dev.vaadin.com/svn/incubator/QuickTickets/trunk/installationscripts/jmeter-instance.sh[jmeter-instance.sh]
installation script as the root user.

* Download the
http://dev.vaadin.com/svn/incubator/QuickTickets/trunk/installationscripts/jmeter-test-script.jmx[JMeter
script].
** The script contains prerecorded ticket purchase sequence that lasts
about 2.5 minutes.

* Open the script in JMeter and make sure you configure the following
settings to suit your test:
** HTTP Request Defaults (set the server name)
** Thread Group (thread count, ramp-up, loop count)
** Summary report (result file name)

* Upload the test script to the JMeter instance(s).

* When logged in as root to the JMeter server you can start the test
from command line with the following
command: `~/jakarta-jmeter-2.4/bin/jmeter.sh -n -t ~/jmeter-test-script.jmx`

* After the run is complete you'll have `jmeter-results.jtl` file (or
the filename you used for the report) which you can open in JMeter for
analyzing the results.

[[results]]
5. Results
^^^^^^^^^^

Jump directly to the results:
https://vaadin.com/blog/vaadin-scalability-study-quicktickets[blog
post about the experiment and the results].