Hands On System Design with "Distributed Systems Implementation - 254-Lesson’s curriculum"

Day 14: Building Your First Load Generator - Stress Testing Your Distributed System

Core System Design Concepts

Throughput measures how much work your system completes per unit of time - logs processed per second in our case. Latency measures how long individual requests take. These metrics often trade off against each other: higher throughput sometimes means higher latency.

A load generator simulates real-world traffic patterns. Unlike simple benchmarks that measure theoretical maximums, load generators test realistic scenarios with varying loads, network conditions, and failure modes.