BLASTA

Django load testing template

Public pages, the admin login, static files and a JSON API.

Category FrameworksStack Gunicorn/uWSGI + DjangoJobs 18

About this Django load test

Load tests a Django site behind Gunicorn or uWSGI: the home page, the admin login page, a static file and a Django REST framework list endpoint. Comparing the static file with the dynamic pages shows how much of the load is Python and how much is your web server.

It holds 18 ready-made jobs: 4 single scenarios and an enterprise test plan of 14 stages to run in order, 12 of them with pass/fail targets (SLOs). Each job is a plain request pattern you can change before running.

Scenarios include django home page, django admin login page, django static file and django REST framework list.

How to load test Django

  1. Open the template in BLASTA.
  2. Set url to point at your own Django system, ideally a staging copy.
  3. Pick a job and choose the rate and duration.
  4. Start the run and watch requests per second, latency percentiles and errors live; the result is saved to your history.

What you set before running

url
Site base URL, no trailing slash

Test scenarios (4)

django admin login page

Read-only

Renders a form with a CSRF token and sets a cookie. A good canary for the worker pool.

django static file

Read-only

If this is slow, static files are going through Python. Serve them from WhiteNoise, nginx or a CDN.

Enterprise test plan (14)

Run in order: smoke, baseline, load, stress, spike, soak, breakpoint and failover window, each with pass/fail targets.

Django: 01 smoke

Read-only

Enterprise plan, step 1 of 10. One request a second for 30 seconds. Run this first, every time: it proves the address, credentials and headers are right and that the environment is up before any real load is applied. Gate: zero errors. Reference request: django home page.

Django: 02 baseline (20% load)

Read-only

Step 2 of 10. About a fifth of normal traffic for 5 minutes: the uncontended latency of this request. Every later result is judged against it, so record p50 and p95. Gate: at most 0.5% errors and the default latency targets. Reference request: django home page.

Django: 03 average load (SLO check)

Read-only

Step 3 of 10. Normal busy-hour traffic for 10 minutes. The rate is the reference job's rate: raise it to your measured production peak-hour rate. This is the run that proves (or breaks) your SLO. Gate: at most 1% errors, p95 and p99 inside the targets. Reference request: django home page.

Django: 04 peak load (2x average)

Read-only

Step 4 of 10. Twice the average for 10 minutes: the busiest hour of the year plus headroom. Latency may rise, but must stay in SLO; if it does not, you have no headroom. Gate: at most 2% errors, latency targets doubled. Reference request: django home page.

Django: 05 stress (ramp to 4x)

Read-only

Step 5 of 10. Ramps to four times average over 10 minutes, then holds for 2. Finds where it degrades and HOW: gracefully (latency rises, errors stay low) or badly (errors, timeouts, crashes, restarts). Observation only, no gate. Reference request: django home page.

Django: 06 spike (10x in 10 s)

Read-only

Step 6 of 10. Reaches ten times average within 10 seconds and holds for 2 minutes: a campaign email, a news link, a failover. Checks autoscaling, queue limits and load shedding. Gate: at most 5% errors, because shedding load is acceptable and crashing is not. Reference request: django home page.

Django: 07 recovery after the spike

Read-only

Step 7 of 10. Run IMMEDIATELY after the spike, at average load for 5 minutes. Latency and errors must return to the baseline from step 2. If they do not, something is stuck: queues, connection pools, GC, an autoscaler cool-down. Gate: same as average load. Reference request: django home page.

Django: 08 soak (1 hour at 60%)

Read-only

Step 8 of 10. One hour of steady load. Finds leaks and slow decay in memory, connections, file descriptors, disk, log volume and cache churn. Watch the resource graphs: any line that climbs and never flattens is a finding. Gate: at most 0.5% errors. Reference request: django home page.

Django: 09 breakpoint (find the ceiling)

Read-only

Step 9 of 10. Ramps to twenty times average over 20 minutes. Stop it when errors pass about 5%: the rate at that moment is your ceiling, and ceiling divided by peak is your capacity margin. Use a production-like environment, never production. Reference request: django home page.

Django: 10 resilience window (failover / deploy)

Read-only

Step 10 of 10. Average load for 15 minutes. About 5 minutes in, cause the event you are testing: kill a pod or node, fail over the database, roll out a new version, drain a zone. Errors in the window are your real availability loss. Gate: at most 1% errors overall; read the time series for how long the dip lasted. Reference request: django home page.

Django: no keep-alive (new connection per request)

Read-only

Sends Connection: close, so every request pays for a new TCP and TLS handshake: the cost for clients that do not reuse connections (scripts, some mobile SDKs, health checkers). Shows load balancer and TLS termination limits. Reference request: django home page.

Django: crawler traffic (Googlebot user agent)

Read-only

Same request identified as a search crawler. Tests WAF and bot-management rules and whether crawlers get cached or origin responses. Crawlers can easily be a third of all traffic. Reference request: django home page.

Django: large cookies (~4 KB header)

Read-only

Adds a 4 KB Cookie header, like a logged-in user with many tracking cookies. Proxies and servers reject headers around 8 KB, so this shows how close you are to that limit. Reference request: django home page.

Django: uptime monitors (HEAD from many locations)

Read-only

A fleet of synthetic monitors checking the URL with HEAD requests every 30 seconds from 20 locations, plus load balancer probes. Cheap each, constant in total. Reference request: django home page.

Frequently asked questions

What does the Django load test cover?

The Django template has 18 jobs: 4 single scenarios and an enterprise test plan of 14 stages (smoke, baseline, load, stress, spike, soak, breakpoint and failover window). Scenarios include django home page, django admin login page, django static file and django REST framework list. 12 of them have pass/fail targets (SLOs), so a run can be judged against limits you set.

How do I load test Django with BLASTA?

Open the template in BLASTA and set url, then pick a job and start it. Results stream live: requests per second, latency percentiles and errors, and the run is kept in your history. To run from the command line, use blasta preset new django with your address.

Is it safe to run the Django load test against production?

All 18 jobs in this template are read-only: they request pages or data and do not change anything. Even so, a load test can slow a live system down, so start with a low rate and prefer a staging copy. Only test systems you own or have permission to test.

Related templates

Run a load test

Point BLASTA at something you own, choose how hard to hit it, and press Start test. Results stream in live.

1 What do you want to test? Use a template

Request headers

2 How hard should it hit?

Advanced limits
Pass / fail targets (SLO) optional
The result is marked SLO met or SLO missed. The same targets live in a job file, where blasta run exits 2 on a miss so CI or Kubernetes can gate a release.

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