Welcome to Performance Testing

What is Performance Testing?

image source: Google

Performance testing is a process of determination of a system in terms of its speed, responsiveness, effectiveness and capacity when the system is subjected to certain amount of user load.

The main focus of performance testing is to determine software application's 

• Speed: To check if the system is behaving or responding quickly
• Scalability: To check the maximum number of concurrent users a system can handle
• Stability: To check the behavior of the system when the system is subjected to various user load

The bottlenecks identified in the performance testing stage will be resolved in performance engineering process.

Why do we do Performance Test?

image source: Google

We as a customer expects a lot of things while using a software, The main concern of any customer who use a software application is the response time of the application. Suppose, Ravi and Suresh wants to book two tatkal train tickets for thier trip to Delhi, Assume there are two applications (App A & App B) from where tatkal ticket can be booked. Ravi decided to use App A where as Suresh selected App B. Both Ravi and suresh have clicked on Book ticekt button at 10AM. For Ravi, the tatkal ticket has been booked as App A has responded very quickly, say 5 seconds where as For Suresh, ticket has not been booked as the responsiveness of App B was poor. As a result, Suresh has decided to use App A from next time onwards and also make all of his friends aware on how poor the App B was.

In this case, App B has lost his customer and reputation which can may lead to cut down the business profits. That is why it is important to performance test an application to determine its performance metrics before the product is launching in the market.

In this blog, I will give you an overview on entire performance testing process and I will also share my experience regarding issues I faced while conducting the performance test.

Types of Performance Test:

• LOAD TEST: Usually load testing is carried out to check how much user loan can a system sustain. In this test, the number of user load will be increased constantly until the load reaches to threshold limit.  The main reason for carrying out this test is to check if the application is behaving properly under anticipated user load.
• ENDURANCE TEST: In endurance test, system will be tested for longer duration with average expected user load. The main purpose of this test is to check memory leaks and system failures. This test is usually carried out for 6,8,12 hours. It can also be called as Soak Testing.
• STRESS TEST: In Stress test, Performance sensitivity will be tested. The main focus of this test is to check the stable behavior if the system when hardware resources such as CPU, Memory and Disk Space are not sufficient.
• SPIKE TEST: In spike testing, user load is increased or decreased suddenly so as to check how the system is behaving in unexpected conditions and how the system is sustaining the sudden changes in the user load.
• VOLUME TEST:  It is a type of test where system will be tested with a large amount of data to be processed to check the efficiency of the application. The main focus of this test is to monitor the performance of application under varying database volumes.
• SCALABILITY TEST: This test is to determine application's capacity to scale up in terms of any of its non-functional capability like the user load supported, the number of transactions, the data volume etc. The main goal is to understand at what point of peak load the system prevent more scaling.