What is Performance Testing?
If we should explain our definition of Performance Testing in one sentence it would be;
“Performance Testing is artificially creating or simulating load and measuring how your environment handles it.”
This means it doesn’t necessary have to be how a system performs under high load, it can also be how it performs under base load or expected load. It doesn’t even have to be structured, automated or created in TestWare like soapUI; simply refreshing you web browser over and over again very fast is a Load Test.
What kinds of Performance Testing are there?
There are a great number of definitions of performance testing, please realize that we know that this is only one way to define performance testing. Based on the above we use as an umbrella for many types of Performance related testing;
• Baseline Testing
This is purely technically exactly what Performance Testing is, but we feel it’s important to establish as a separate task. Baseline Testing examines how a system performs under expected or normal load and creates a baseline against which the other types of tests can be related.
Goal: Find metrics for system performance under normal load
• Load Testing
Load Testing includes increasing the Load and see how the system behaves under higher load. During Load Tests you can monitor response times, throughput, server condition and much more. The goal of Load Testing is not to break the target environment though.
Goal: Find metrics for system performance under high load
• Stress Testing
The goal of Stress Test is exactly that; to find the volume of load where the system actually breaks or is close to breaking.
Goal: Find the system breaking point
• Soak Testing
In order to find system instabilities that occur over time, we need to conduct tests that run over a long period. That is what Soak Testing is for; run Load Tests or even Baseline Tests over a long period of time and see how the target environment handles system resources and that we see no unwanted behavior as a result of the time as a factor. The most common defect found by Soak Testing is memory leaks. The most common scenario for Soak Testing is turning on a number of tests when you leave work on a Friday and let it run over the weekend.
Goal: Make sure no unwanted behavior emerges over time.
• Scalability Testing
Scalability Testing is very much like Load Testing, but instead of increasing the number of requests, we instead increase the size or the complexity of the requests sent. This involves for example sending large requests, large attachments, or deeply nestled requests.
Goal: Find metrics for system performance under high volumes of data.
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