Should I Conduct Load Testing on Live or Development Site?

Regarding your setup, if you must absolutely test on production, make sure to do it during off-peak hours and keep it brief, monitoring everything closely for any unusual activity. Still, a good staging environment is the way to go. Tools like k6 or Artillery work well for simulating loads, and if possible, test from different regions to mimic global traffic patterns.

We typically only load test our backend systems since our frontend is a single-page app hosted on S3 with CloudFront. For our backend tests, we set up a separate environment similar to production but limit the auto-scaling to keep it manageable. This way, we're confident our back end can handle the load without impacting the live environment.

I highly recommend against load testing on a live site with actual ad serving. It truly complicates things—polluting analytics, potentially alerting fraud detection, and causing issues with ad networks. Instead, have a staging environment that reflects your production setup as closely as possible. You can still get accurate load testing results while keeping your live site safe.

You really want to avoid testing on a live environment when it comes to load tests, especially with real ad serving. You risk messing up your analytics and could trigger fraud detection with the ad networks. Instead, I'd suggest creating a staging environment that mimics your production setup exactly. Just replace the real ad tags with mock scripts so you can simulate the load effectively. This way, you can test server responses, database queries, and cache behavior without the risk of messing with your live metrics.