[chore] Load testing Ceramic in Passport staging

[erichfi]

During GR14, we have helped the Ceramic team discover and fix several bugs and issues with Ceramic. They have since released these bug fixes in new release candidates, and recommended we update our node versions (https://discord.com/channels/682786569857662976/963185659638607982/991107872240963674)

We should update our Ceramic node in staging if it hasn't been upgraded to the recommended version, and perform a load test.

To set up the load test, we could script HTTP API requests to our node directly (see https://developers.ceramic.network/build/http/api/), or use a test file like our database-client integration tests

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WIP branch: ceramic-loadtests

[luke-focusedlabs]

Current plan of attack:

• Upgrade our node to newest RC of ceramic to benefit from memory leak fix
• Port the test suite linked above to an Artillery suite
• Bonk the ceramic server and see what happens

[shavinac]

Ceramic image tag: ceramicnetwork/js-ceramic:a21ba7506db7
corresponding to commit: ceramicnetwork/js-ceramic@a21ba75 publishing release candidate mentioned

edit: most recent release published: ceramicnetwork/js-ceramic:43aa0781b772
github commit: ceramicnetwork/js-ceramic@43aa078

most recent release-candidate: ceramicnetwork/js-ceramic:8bd7143cdec8
github commit: ceramicnetwork/js-ceramic@8bd7143

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Updated Testnet Ceramic node (staging) to release-candidate ceramicnetwork/js-ceramic:8bd7143cdec8 - https://app.pulumi.com/gitcoin/ceramic/testnet-node/updates/81

[luke-focusedlabs]

Update on work thus far - Artillery seems like a good solution, the time-consuming portion of the task has been that, according to their docs, a DID client is required to do any write operations on the ceramic node.

Artillery does not know how to do this, but provides an API to create an "engine" which is what I've begun doing.

[shavinac]

Blocked -- currently stuck on a CommonJS / ESM compatibility issue.

Artillery expects CommonJS, but the passport database-client and all Ceramic-related dependencies are ESM modules which are incompatible.

• We have not found a good way to transpile or transform the ESM modules into CommonJS format, since the ESM dependencies are pulling in additional nested ESM dependencies, and it is unknown how deep one would need to replace/transform. We have tried async dynamic imports but ran into the nested ESM dependency issue
• We could try converting the Artillery Engine to ESM, but unclear if this would be compatible with Artillery runners. Maybe reach out to the Artillery team about this?
• We could try finding a different load-testing library that is compatible with ESM modules
• We could try using lower Ceramic versions (1.x?) before the ESM change, and cobble together a CommonJS-compatible testing script - hopefully the relevant parts of the HTTP API would still be compatible with our ceramic node
• We could create a "wrapper" nodejs server that exposes an API that can be hammered by Artillery, and the nodejs server handles the Ceramic/DIDs stuff?

[nutrina]

just for reference, the branch containing the work is: https://github.com/gitcoinco/passport/tree/ceramic-loadtests