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title: Load testing an event-driven message queue | daily.dev
description: A walkthrough of load testing an event-driven queue's HTTP events API using K6, a Go-based load testing tool. Covers setting up basic K6 scripts, running...
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# Load testing an event-driven message queue

**[Inngest Blog](https://daily.dev/sources/inngest)** · 6 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A walkthrough of load testing an event-driven queue's HTTP events API using K6, a Go-based load testing tool. Covers setting up basic K6 scripts, running virtual-user ramp tests, and interpreting metrics like p90/p95 latency. Includes real-world results from testing on AWS ECS/SQS infrastructure, showing latency increases significantly under load, with a recommendation of roughly 1 vCPU per 150 requests/second on a 1GB RAM instance. Ends with a plug for the company's hosted cloud service as a zero-setup alternative.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://www.inngest.com/blog/2022-07-load-testing-event-queue>

## Questions this post answers

### How do I run a basic load test against an HTTP API using k6?

Write a small JavaScript script that imports k6/http and posts a JSON payload to the target URL, then run it with a command like k6 run --vus 25 --duration 30s ./post.js. This ramps up 25 virtual users making continuous POST requests for 30 seconds and prints metrics including http_req_duration, requests per second, and failure rate.

_daily.dev surfaces practical k6 workflows for developers benchmarking their own APIs before shipping._

### How many requests per second can a small AWS ECS instance handle before latency degrades badly?

On a 1GB RAM / 0.5 vCPU ECS instance, an events API handled 110 requests/second with median latency around 7.7ms, but at 300 requests/second median latency jumped to about 91.7ms, with p99 reaching 187ms. This suggests provisioning roughly 1 vCPU per 150 requests/second for similar workloads.

_engineers sizing infrastructure for event APIs can track real-world capacity benchmarks like this on daily.dev._

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---

Tags: [#architecture](https://daily.dev/tags/architecture), [#aws](https://daily.dev/tags/aws), [#inngest](https://daily.dev/tags/inngest), [#load-testing](https://daily.dev/tags/load-testing)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/load-testing-an-event-driven-message-queue-ahkckjqri)

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