---
sidebar_label: Load Testing Guidelines
title: Load Testing Guidelines
description: |
  Information about how best to scale up your bot to support parallel user activity
  and how you can use tracing to help debug issues.
---

## Overview

In order to gather metrics on our system's ability to handle increased loads and users, we have performed tests to evaluate the maximum number of concurrent users a Rasa assistant can handle with certain machine configurations.
In each test case we spawned the following number of concurrent users at peak concurrency using a [spawn rate](https://docs.locust.io/en/1.5.0/configuration.html#all-available-configuration-options) of 1000 users per second.
In our tests we used the Rasa [HTTP-API](https://rasa.com/docs/rasa/pages/http-api) and the [Locust](https://locust.io/) open source load testing tool.


|        Users             |               CPU                            |      Memory   |
|--------------------------|----------------------------------------------|---------------|
| Up to 50,000             |         6vCPU                                |      16 GB    |
| Up to 80,000             |         6vCPU, with almost 90% CPU usage     |      16 GB    |


### Some recommendations to improve latency
- Sanic Workers must be mapped 1:1 to CPU for both Rasa Pro and Rasa Action Server
- Create `async` actions to avoid any blocking I/O
- `enable_selective_domain: true` : Domain is only sent for actions that needs it. This massively trims the payload between the two pods.
- Consider using compute efficient machines on cloud which are optimized for high performance computing such as the C5 instances on AWS.
  However, as they are low on memory, models need to be trained lightweight.


|        Machine                 |               RasaPro                          |      Rasa Action Server                          |
|--------------------------------|------------------------------------------------|--------------------------------------------------|
| AWS C5 or Azure F or Gcloud C2 |   3-7vCPU, 10-16Gb Memory, 3-7 Sanic Threads   |    3-7vCPU, 2-12Gb Memory, 3-7 Sanic Threads     |


### Debugging bot related issues while scaling up

To test the Rasa [HTTP-API](https://rasa.com/docs/rasa/pages/http-api) ability to handle a large number of concurrent user activity we used the Rasa Pro [tracing](./tracing.mdx) capability
along with a tracing backend or collector, such as Jaeger, to collect traces for the bot under test.

:::note

Our team is currently in the process of running additional performance-related tests. More information will be added here as we progress.

:::