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Artillery

DEVOPS
Velocity0.0

Load testing and smoke testing toolkit for modern backends

www.artillery.io ↗

Half the release notes are a Playwright version bump; the other half is cloud-runner damage control.

load-testingplaywrightaws-fargatemetric-cardinalitydistributed-tracingcloud-runners
◆Current state
Artillery ships every few weeks, and almost every release opens with a Playwright upgrade — 1.58.0, 1.58.1, 1.60.0, 1.61.0 across this window. Underneath that treadmill, the recurring subject is the hosted runners: Fargate, Azure ACI and the CLI that coordinates them keep producing bugs where tests silently run wrong rather than failing outright.
◆Where it's heading
The most consequential fixes are the ones about tests lying to you. http.timeout was silently capped at 8 seconds regardless of configuration, so slow backends failed with socket timeouts that looked like the backend's fault. Fargate ran fewer virtual users than configured when tests depended on external npm modules. Both ACI and Fargate reported incomplete results when a test tracked many distinct metrics — which is also what drove the query-string normalization work, since Playwright tests generate unbounded metric cardinality from URLs. Meanwhile the product is reaching outward: W3C Trace Context propagation lets a load test's traffic be correlated with backend traces.
◆Prediction
Expect continued reliability work on the distributed runners and further metric-cardinality controls, since those two threads account for most non-Playwright changes here. The Playwright bumps will keep arriving on their own schedule.

◆Recent moves

  1. 1mo ago

    Artillery 2.0.33 swaps Falso for Faker.js in fake-data

    A Playwright bump to 1.61.0 and a swap of Falso for Faker.js in the fake-data plugin. Dependency maintenance with no behavioral change for existing tests.

    View source ↗
  2. 2mo ago

    Artillery 2.0.32 lifts the silent 8-second http.timeout cap

    Fixes a genuinely misleading bug: http.timeout was silently capped at 8 seconds, so requests to backends slow to send a first byte failed with ERR_SOCKET_TIMEOUT no matter what users configured. Also resolves startup MODULE_NOT_FOUND errors and a Fargate case where tests ran with fewer virtual users than requested.

    View source ↗
  3. 3mo ago

    Artillery 2.0.31 propagates W3C Trace Context to backends

    Adds W3C Trace Context propagation, attaching a traceparent header to outgoing requests so backend traces can be tied to the load test that generated them. The Fargate heartbeat is the other notable piece — worker tasks now self-terminate if the CLI disappears for 180 seconds, closing a path to orphaned paid infrastructure.

    View source ↗
  4. 6mo ago

    Artillery v2.0.30

    A Playwright bump plus a Fargate packaging fix ensuring pre-packaged Playwright and CLI versions are used rather than reinstalled, which had caused browser binary mismatches.

    View source ↗
  5. 6mo ago

    Artillery v2.0.29

    Playwright 1.58.0 and a Fargate fix for incomplete results when tests track many distinct metrics — the same cardinality problem addressed more directly in 2.0.28.

    View source ↗
  6. 6mo ago

    Artillery 2.0.28 normalizes query strings to cut metric cardinality

    Attacks metric cardinality at the source with stripQueryString and normalizeQueryString, the latter on by default, collapsing URLs like /page?id=123 into /page?id=NUMBER. Pairs with fixes for Azure ACI incomplete results and a Fargate bug where --scenario-name was ignored and every scenario ran.

    View source ↗