Purpose

The purpose of this Wiki page is to collect my thoughts about performance testing as well as introduce some common concepts.

Definition of Performance Testing

Performance testing is a type of testing intended to determine the repsonsivenes, throughput, reliability, and/or scalability of a system under a given workload. Performance testing is commonly conducted to accomplish the following: Assess production readiness

• • Assess the product readiness
  • Evaluate against performance criteria
  • Compare performance characteristics of multiple systems or system configurations
  • Find the source of performance problems
  • Support system tuning
  • Find throughput levels

Categories of Performance Tests

The four main categories of performance tests are:

Performance testing

This type of testing determines or validates the speed, scalability, and/or stability characteristics of the sytem or application under test. Performance is concerned with achieving response times, throughput, and resource-utilizations levels that meet the performance objectives for the product.

Load testing

Load testing is focused on detrmining or validating performance characteristics of the system or application under test when subjected to workloads and load volumes anticipated during production operations. This includes both normal and peak load conditions.

Endurance testing is a subset of Load testing. An endurance test focuses on determining or validating the performance characteristics on the product when subjected to workloads and load volumes anticipated during production operations over an extended period of time

Stress testing

Stess testing is focused on determining or validating performance characteristics of the system or application under test when subjected to conditions beyond those anticipated during production operations. Stress testing might also focus on determining performance characteristics under other stressful conditions, such as limited memory, insufficent disk space or server failure.

Spike testing is a subset of Stress testing. A spike test focuses on determining or validating performance characteristics of the product when subjected to load conditions that repeatedly increase beyond anticipated production operations for short periods of time.

Capacity testing

Capacity testing is conducted in conjunction with capacity planning. You plan for future growth, such as an increased user base or increased volume of data. How many additional resources are necessary to support future usage levels, such as processor capacity, memory usage, disk capacity, network bandwidth etc.

Web Application Performance Core Activities

Click on the QE - Performance Test Core Activities link to see details about the seven core activities that are integral to performance testing. Do NOT start any performance testing until you have reviewed this section.

Tool Selection

Click on the QE - Load and Performance Tool Selection Criteria to see my ramblings

nGenera Product Load and Performance Needs

Click on the QA - nGenera Product Load and Performance Needs for my notes