Disk I/O scalability
Test that your service scales as expected when Disk I/O is limited. Gremlin will carry out many read and write operations in the target's /var/tmp directory. Estimated test length: 20 minutes.
IO
Containers
Kubernetes
Linux
Windows
20 minutes
How this Scenario works
This Scenario runs a sustained series of read and write operations in the target's /var/tmp directory, saturating disk I/O and adding latency for anything else competing for the same storage. It runs across Linux hosts, Windows hosts, containers, and Kubernetes, so you can compare how each environment behaves when storage becomes the bottleneck.
Why run this Scenario?
Storage is a finite resource that, when exhausted, can have unpredictable and potentially catastrophic effects on your systems. When applications and services can no longer write to disk, they might stop accepting new requests, go into an automatic suspend state, or crash. If a large file transfer is hogging up IOPS, applications that use disk may slow down, causing system-wide latency. Completing this Scenario demonstrates that your applications can tolerate low disk space and latency without failure.
- Identify bottlenecks in database-heavy workloads.
- Understand impact of slow persistent storage on services.
- Test logging and metric systems under I/O pressure.
What to expect when you run it
If disk I/O latency increases (e.g., by 50 ms), the service can still process incoming requests within SLA limits.
More Scenarios to try
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