WHAT IS
PERFORMANCE TESTING?
Performance testing refers to testing that can create/mimic load, and also help measure how applications behave in different environments. It requires an expertise across a wide range of applications including client-server, web, distributed, mobile, cloud databases, high volume transaction systems, and highly complex applications. It helps clients launch applications that are highly reliable, responsive, scalable, stable, and available.
Some other areas that are covered under the purview of Performance testing are performance engineering, capacity planning, testing for baseline, endurance, load, and stress, and benchmarking against competitors, production monitoring, and consulting. Performance testing also helps generate a detailed analysis and provides suggestions for improving performance.
Types of Performance Testing
Performance testing covers quite a few types of testing such as:
Baseline Testing: This is the purest form of performance testing. It tests how the system performs under normal conditions and prepares a baseline comparison with performance under expected load.
Load Testing: Load testing checks performance and app behavior against increasing load (requests). Load Testing helps monitor throughput, the response times, server conditions, and a lot more.
Scalability Testing: Though similar to load testing, scalability testing checks the apps for increased complexity, such as deeply nested requests, instead of performing checks against an increase in the number of requests.
Soak Testing: Soak Testing helps check the system vulnerability by running it over a long period of time. A common Soak test approach is to start the test on a Friday and leave it running over the entire weekend.
Stress Testing: Stress test helps find the volume load/maximum capacity of the system and indicate the point where a system may actually break.
5 TOOLS
USED FOR PERFORMANCE TESTING
There are multiple performance testing tools used widely for measuring the stress capacity and the performance of web applications. These tools ensure robust performance of applications even in cases of heavy load and and extreme traffic.
Following is a brief description of the top 5 performance testing tools.
AppLoader is a load testing solution. It is used mainly to test business applications end-to-end – including testing of third-party applications. However, it does not require writing any code or adding plugins. It helps test apps by recreating a similar user experience across all access points, whether fat or thin clients, or web portals. Replicating the interactions of users’ helps generate valuable metrics about end users’ use the applications, and what are the problems faced.
AppLoader is compatible with Cloud-Based and hybrid Infrastructures, custom applications, EHR systems including Epic and McKesson, and all versions of Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop.
WebLOAD supports generating load both on on-premise machines and the cloud and helps execute load and performance tests on internet applications technologies such as Oracle Forms, .NET, HTML5, Adobe Flex, Ajax, and more. Its easy to use features such as automatic correlation, DOM-based recording/playback, and JavaScript support performance testing even for complex scenarios and heavy user loads. WebLOAD also provides a clear analysis of the functionality and performance of the web applications.
LoadUI NG Pro helps create complex, real-world load tests based on API. Its easy-to-use GUI helps setup load scenarios easily and analyze results and generate reports regarding server performance. It supports JMS, REST, MQTT, SOAP, and many other API formats and allows reuse of existing functional test cases from SoapUI and SoapUI NG Pro.
LoadView is an on-demand load testing tool that helps perform seamless testing in real browsers that provides almost real data. It is 100% scalable, cloud-based, and can be quickly deployed. LoadView also helps perform advanced Load Testing such as Point-and-Click Scripting using a Global Cloud-based Infrastructure.
SmartMeter.io uses a JMeter interface and makes it very easy to create test scenarios by simply clicking in an embedded browser. It does not require a browser plugin or a proxy setup. It automatically generates test reports in the form of statistical overviews that display results such as trend analysis and evaluated acceptance criteria. It is compatible with macOS, Linux, and Windows, and is strong in CI integration and distributed testing.
Reasons Why Performance Testing is Important in the App Development Process
Performance testing cannot, and must not, be treated as just another step in the SDLC. In fact, in today’s Agile and DevOps environments, it has to be an integral part of the entire development process. Though usually it is agreed upon that load testing tools are a good fit for the Agile processes, it is just because it is felt that the tool is easy to handle. However, with Integration support being accepted as a business-critical task, continuous integration (CI) and Agile methodologies have taken a centre-stage, along with performance testing. An Agile project requires a number of tests to be performed on a continuous basis, which leads to the need of automated performance testing. In essence, Agile support today has become a critical theme in the load testing tools.
That said, factors such as the system, development and deployment processes, the ability to automate and automatically analyze results, and the workload need to be considered thoroughly before integrating performance testing in a DevOps or an Agile environment. While load testing originally never was meant to be a part of integration and was considered a separate task by itself, the performance testing environment has undergone a major disruption. Today, load/performance testing is meant to be a fully integrated part of CI and is required to be run for every change made to the system.
Integrating performance testing today involves automating the entire process that includes setting up an environment, running tests, and reporting and analyzing results. Automation of performance testing activities, though not feasible in all cases, it helps finding regressions and checking against requirements. What is really needed is a combination of automated tests that would cover most of the testing cycle.
Performance testing tools can also be used for other important tasks such as integrated monitoring, robust cloud integration, and support of new technologies. Continuously monitoring and analyzing the integration helps in the collection of accurate information, that further helps in the proper evaluation of the complicated performance testing results.
Performance/load testing is a must for your website or APIs as it helps you to:
- Find your application’s behavior under load
- Identify potential bottlenecks of your application
- Know how many parallel users your website can handle
- Find out the breaking points of the technology stack used by your application
- Find out how slow the APIs or any other web service respond under heavy load
- Understand if any errors appear to the end users and how are these going to affect their journey
- Find out if the changes done in each release had a bad influence on the performance behavior of the application
- Be confident you can make a email campaign and all your customers are going to experience the designed workflow
- Check the time it takes for your server to respond to clients and understand if your website loads in a decent amount of time
- Discover the number of concurrent users that can access your application without a heavy degradation of the user experience
- Discover hardware issues or hardware/VM related problems, like limitation on the number of threads or file descriptors configured on the system
- Understand if the database technology or the connections to the databases (Postgres, Redis, Mongo etc.) represent a bottleneck in your application
CSS CORP PERFORMANCE TESTING
– A BRIEF OVERVIEW
Our performance testing and engineering services enhance your business productivity and align your business strategies with ever changing business needs. CSS Corp’s performance testing techniques and methodologies ensure that applications are thoroughly tested for scalability, volume, performance and varying stress and load. We provide continuous support for performance – driven development and enable large scale benchmarks and holiday readiness.
We help develop a future proof system with high responsiveness, availability and scalability. Our highly skilled resource pool with rich experience in process models, methodologies and performance testing tools like Load Runner, NeoLoad and TestPlant can support multiple business models across geographies and industries. Our IPs like Problr coupled with open source performance testing tools like Jmeter can help you reduce the cost of performance testing by 60%.
Leverage our proactive performance engineering capabilities to identify the bottlenecks and resolve the application performance issues smoothly.