I like the discipline of publishing my results on a blog. It forces me to double check my results and look for discrepancies in data.

The numbers I got in my recent Taurus test seemed off. Using a modified example configuration (concurrency 50, time 300s,) Taurus was able to completely saturate 4 cores of VM it was runnig on. At the same time, it was not able to saturate the VM with the Nginx instance under test. Nginx’s VM was using on average 80% of its single core. Taurus generated 352 requests per second to main page, which resulted in 2812 requests per second if I count static dependencies that were being downloaded, since Taurus was ignoring cache settings. Those numbers agree with the Nginx access.log entries.

While searching for a lightweight tool to stress test my simple Nginx installation hosting a Hugo-generated website, I found Taurus. So far I’ve been using mostly custom in-house developed tools for stress testing, and those tools are not something that I can use at home.

Taurus looks good at first glance and has a simple installation manual, but unfortunately, it did not work correctly on Debian 12 when I tested it. So I wrote a short manual on how to set it up from scratch.

Here is a basic manual on how to set up Hugo on Debian 12, with Nginx and snakeoil TLS for basic development needs.

Lately I have been looking for a better way to store instructions and documentation that I create when I’m playing with my homelab or researching certain topics. A good solution for me has two properties:

1. It’s easy to access and search.
2. It motivates me to keep it fairly clean and up to date.

So I decided to set up a simple blog. As I’m mostly using Markdown for jotting and documenting (for example, in GitHub or Obsidian) I decided to use Hugo. Hugo has great manuals for setting it up. However, at first glance, it looks like it’s focused on cloud deployment. I wanted to do it manually to understand it better and incorporate it into the stack that I’m mostly using, which is composed of Proxmox PVE, Debian, Nginx deployed either via Kubernetes or Terraform/cloud-init. I decided to set up Hugo on Debian 12, with Nginx as a web server, locally in my lab. The idea is that development environment should be as close to production as possible.