While load testing and stress testing are two of the most popular performance testing types, they are far from the only performance testing options available. Load testing is the process of checking the behavior of the system under test under the anticipated load. For example, the piece of software under test is designed to serve X users (because it is an internal product of an enterprise and there are no more employees), so it does not make sense to conduct testing under a higher load.

For example, a word processor or graphics editor can be forced to read an extremely large document; or a financial package can be forced to generate a report based on several years’ worth of data. The most accurate load testing simulates actual use, as opposed to testing using theoretical or analytical modeling. Load testing helps developers identify issues like system lag, slow page load times, or crashes when different levels of traffic are accessing the application during production rather than post-launch. A load testing example would be a tax preparation company evaluating their web application load performance prior to peak income tax filing season and the traffic spikes it causes. A load test is type of software testing which is conducted to understand the behavior of the application under a specific expected load. Load testing is performed to determine a system’s behavior under both normal and at peak conditions.

Benefits of Performance Testing

LoadNinja has a simple and easy-to-use interface that doesn’t require any additional downloads. Adding concurrent virtual users,  configuring test duration, playback time, and more are all possible with a few clicks in our intuitive interface. Spike testing assesses performance by quickly increasing the number of requests up to stress levels and decreasing it again soon after. A spike test will then continue to run with additional ramp-up and ramp-down sequences in either random or constant intervals to ensure continued performance. Before performance testing, it is important to determine your system’s business goals, so you can tell if your system behaves satisfactorily or not according to your customers’ needs.

You may need to change your architecture, replace or change your data models, or even change core business logics and processes. This means that even if your site works fine at the expected 10,000 concurrent users, you’ll keep bumping that number up. For example, In the LoadRunner testing tool, the scenarios are created with the LoadRunner controller’s help. As the results of each scenario are analyzed, testing can help evolve the infrastructure for supporting the most extreme demand that can be expected by identifying and eliminating bottlenecks in the system. Individual component testing isolates individual parts of a system, like a web service or a database call, and performs various tests on that component outside of the rest of the system.

Easily Deploy Load Testing with the LoadRunner Family

While most open-source tools will “get the job done,” they can have drawbacks, especially for enterprise organizations. Open-source tools are often complex, lacking the user-friendliness found in commercial load test automation tools. Additionally, support is usually confined to wikis, forums, and similar, which have limited use in emergencies.

People frequently run successful load tests
with homegrown solutions, open source libraries and tools, and commercial tools including Loadster. If you’re unable or unwilling to load test your actual production environment, it’s crucial to test one that’s as
similar as possible. Attempting to extrapolate load test results to a different environment than the one that is
tested is risky, and should be avoided! Certain user actions can be a lot more time-consuming and taxing to your web application than others.

How To Perform a Load Testing?

Load testing identifies where and when your application breaks, so you can fix the issue before shipping to production. Utilize each of the performance testing types detailed in this blog to ensure you are always aware of any issues and can have a plan for dealing with them. Performance engineering, on the other hand, is a proactive approach to software development that identifies and mitigates performance issues early in the development cycle, from the design. By addressing issues earlier, engineering organizations prevent issues and accelerate time-to-market. However, at some point you will see that while you are adding more and more virtual users, the number of requests per second remains the same or even goes down due to increased response time. Bottlenecks can happen during this stage with errors and even stop serving incoming requests entirely.

A spike test is a specific type of performance test that performs a rapidly increasing number of simultaneous requests in order that simulates large spikes in traffic on a system. A Spike test can be used for load testing an API or app for bottlenecks during periods of rapid growth or high numbers of concurrent users. The goal of spike testing is detecting and analyzing abnormalities within the software or app as demand is suddenly increased or decreased. Performing spike tests before a high number of simultaneous users hit a website or app can identify the bottlenecks that could cause the site or app to slow or crash.

How to do load testing

QA load testing is often performed using software automation like Jenkins within an environment using continuous integration. Businesses and consumers rely heavily on digital applications for critical functions, so it’s important to validate that it can withstand realistic load scenairos. With a higher adoption of digital applications comes higher expectations of quality, and if your application fails in production, it can become costly.

Agile and functional testers provide valuable insight into specific components of the application. Additionally, the data from agile tests helps inform the baseline metrics used in load testing. Most enterprise-level applications require multiple systems to operate, but as the number of databases increases, load testing meaning so do the opportunities for a bottleneck. Load testing software measures database reads and writes plus the number of open database connections. Enterprise testing tools provide various features to scale with the needs of e-commerce sites, service platforms, and professional organizations of all types.

Some common load testing techniques include:

If applications are sent to the market with poor performance metrics, they are likely to gain a bad reputation and also fail sales goals. Performance testing is done in order to eliminate certain performance bottlenecks that can hamper a software application. Mabl is a low-code test automation solution that can help you implement a variety of software testing types within a single platform, including performance testing.

• BlazeMeter is a continuous testing platform that enables developers and testers to test the performance of their web and mobile applications under different user loads.
• Wrk2 is a multi-threaded command line load testing tool that’s capable of producing load at a specified requests rate.
• Without some form of performance testing in place, system performance may be affected by slow response times and inconsistent experiences between users and the operating system (OS).
• Simulate the expected load, the capabilities you are testing, test frequency, ramp-up, and any other part of the scenario.
• We recommend stress testing every once in a while so you know your system’s endurance capabilities.

If you’re a developer or QA engineer or if you work in DevOps, you know you need to conduct different performance testing types in order to make sure each code change or feature addition (a) doesn’t break the system and (b) works. Load testing checks how the systems behave under normal or peak load conditions. Stress testing, on the other hand, is applied to check how the system behaves beyond normal or peak load conditions and how it responds when returning to normal loads. While testing the website or an app under a load, tester is actually simulating how it will perform when hundreds, thousands or even millions of users visit it in real time. Wrk2 is a multi-threaded command line load testing tool that’s capable of producing load at a specified requests rate. It can provide detailed latency statistics and is scriptable with the Lua programming language.

Step 1: Identify the Testing Environment

Load testing in Java can also refer to several different types of tests, as Java can natively run in many different environments on Java virtual machines. The EveryStep Web Recorder is a free web-based scripting tool that records every step of a web transaction and replays the script using a real browser. Record multi-step test scripts of the critical and complex actions your users make, such as button clicks, menu selections, form submissions, shopping cart process, text https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ inputs, as well as image and text validation. Poor performing sites and applications can have a negative impact on conversions, transactions, and most importantly, revenue. Even a few seconds of downtime can significantly impact a company’s bottom line. A recent survey conducted by Veeam, a global leader in the backup and data management space, with over 1,500 IT professionals found that the cost of one hour of downtime for high priority applications was over $84,000.