Why Performance Testing is important

The Performance testing can be easily explained as:-

“Testing that artificially create or mimic load and measures how the application is behaving under the various pressured environment”

This mean that application don’t always have to go through high load,its performance can also be verified under base load or expected load.It doesn;t always have to be automated or created in TestWare,it can simple be tested by refreshing the browser over and over again very fast for load test.

Kinds of Performance Testing

There are many types of testing that are covered under performance testing

1-Baseline Testing

In technical terms this can be defined as pure performance testing.Baseline testing means how the system performs under normal to expected load and outlines a baseline comparison.

2-Load Testing

This includes increasing load and see the system behaviour at  higher load.During load test we can monitor response times,throughout,server condition and much more.

3-Stress Testing

The main agenda for stress test is to find the volume load where the system will actually break or is near to breaking point.

4-Soak Testing.

In order to inspect system vulnerability that occur over time,we need to run test over a long period. The most common bug found in smoke test is memory leaks.The most common case for Soak test if to start your test on friday and leave it to work entire weekend.

5-Scalability Testing.

This is similar to load testing but instead of increasing the number of request we increase the size of complexity.This involves sending large request.large attachments or deeply nested requests

Aspects of Performance Testing

• Reliability

• Speed

• Scalability

• Stability

Problems faced during Performance

Most of the issues in performance revolve around response time, load time,speed and poor scalability. Speed is mainly the most important attributes of an application. Slow running application will lose potential users.Performance testing is done to keep the users attracted towards the application.

Most common things users notice are:

1-Load time-

      Initial time taken for an application to start.

2-Response time-

      Response time taken when the user wait for the result after giving the data as input

3-Scalability-

This problem occurs when application is not able to handle number of users.

4-Bottlenecking-

This is caused when there are either hardware issues or coding error.this cause a decrease of output under specific load conditions.Bottlenecking is generally fixed by adding hardware or fixing poor process.

Some common bottlenecks are:

• Disk usage

• Memory utilization

• Network utilization

• Operating System limitations

• CPU utilization

Summary

Performance testing is an important weapon before launching any product in market because customer reviews are highly based on performance and it is a major task to satisfy the customers and protect investor’s investment against product failure.Some performance testing tools are:

• HP Load Runner

• HTTP Load

• Proxy Sniffer