Scale Testing the Badge Engine

2025-08-20

• #testing
• #development

Notes on how we stabilized the 1000-post scalability test for the Badge Engine.

Goals

• Generate ~1000 realistic posts with varied dates and lengths.
• Build the site without polluting the workspace.
• Verify badges, streaks, and totals render under load.

Approach

1. Run the scale test in a temporary copy of the site.
2. Invoke Eleventy from the real workspace but point --config, --input, and --output to the temp copy.
3. Generate posts that guarantee a 3-day streak ending today and distribute the rest across ~400 days.
4. Assert:
   • Build succeeds.
   • Sparkles appears (either earned or fallback).
   • Current streak ≥ 3 days (verified via activity data builder).
   • Analyzer totals show ≥ 1000 posts.

Why isolate?

Running the build in-place polluted other tests that depend on the canonical content. Isolation keeps the rest of the suite deterministic and fast.

Tips

• Normalize dates to UTC day boundaries in data builders.
• Quote YAML front matter values (titles and tags) in generated content.
• Use describe.sequential() for heavy integration tests that manipulate shared resources.