Performance: Load Testing

Performance Testing

This test is performed to determine how the systems performs in terms of responsiveness and stability under a particular workload. It will also serve to investigate, measure, validate or verify other quality attributes of the system such as scalability, reliability and resource usage.

The Performance tests are to be conducted in two broad areas:

Load Tests: which will be to conduct load tests to:

  • Determine numbers of simultaneous users that the server can support
  • Determine numbers of transactions the server can support
  • Analyze the response time for a large number of transactions using the application over a period of time
  • Identify bottle necks on the server and the application platform
  • Measure the stability, responsiveness and throughput of the application

The following is the list of Load Test Metrics to be measured:

  • Transaction Response Time
  • Throughput
  • Error Rate/Transactions passed & failed

Stress Tests: Stress tests will be conducted to see how the systems handle large number of transactions in a given instance. Generate huge load as quickly as possible to stress the system. Identify the maximum number of transactions the application can handle in a specific period of time.

The stress tests will be conducted as described below:

  • During stress tests, apply sudden load within a short period of time e.g.: A hundred user trying to post transactions at the same second
  • Simulate required number of virtual users to execute test scenarios

Endurance Tests will also be conducted to see how the systems handle large number of transactions in a given instance by generating huge load as quickly as possible to stress the system to its limits. Identify the maximum number of transactions the application can handle in a specific period of time and at what point the application will overload and break down.

Failover Tests technique that validates a system's ability to be able to allocate extra resource and to move operations to back-up systems during the server failure due to one or the other reasons. Such as a DB or App server failure.

The following is the list of Load Test Metrics to be measured during Performance testing:

  • Transaction Response Time/li>
  • Throughput
  • Average Hits per second
  • CPU utilization
  • Memory Utilization
  • Error Rate/Transactions passed & failed