Stress testing Camunda
In today's chaos experiment, we focused on stress-testing the Camunda 8 orchestration cluster under high-load conditions. We simulated a large number of concurrent process instances to evaluate the performance of processing and system reliability.
Due to our recent work in supporting load tests for different versions, we were able to compare how different Camunda versions handle stress.
TL;DR: Overall, we saw that all versions of the Camunda 8 orchestration cluster (with focus on the processing) are robust and can handle high loads effectively and reliably. In consideration of throughput and latency, with similar resource allocation among the brokers, 8.7.x outperforms other versions. If we consider our streamlined architecture (which now contains more components in a single application) and align the resources for 8.8.x, it can achieve similar throughput levels as 8.7.x, while maintaining significantly lower latency (a factor of 2). An overview of the results can be found in the Results section below.
[Update: 28.11.2025]
After the initial analysis, we conducted further experiments with 8.8 to understand why the measured processing performance was lower compared to 8.7.x. The blog post (including TL;DR) has been updated with the new findings in the section Further Experiments below.