What is Performance Testing?

Performance Testing

Performance  is the key factor for any website,online shopping sites and any tickets booking sites. Mainly,In performance we will check the functionality of the application under Load.

I will take a simple example of IRCTC system.I wanted to book a Tatkal ticket from Bangalore to Mumbai,I have started booking procedure(Entered all entries) .When I reached on the payment page that time its showed me "Server Not Found" or "Server is not able to find DNS".

But for other user payment page is able to visible.that means the performance is not good.

Performance Testing Procedure

Performance Testing Life cycle

Performance testing is a Non-Functional testing,here we check System or application  behavior

Stability of the application.Basically performance testing is a subset of performance engineering is a computer science practice which strives to build performance standards into the implementation,design and architecture of the system.

A Simple Example Of Performance Testing Procedure

Lets,Consider I have a site of "Online Shopping"and I want to do performance testing of this site.

Step I : Identify the scenarios of this site on what basis we will do performance testing,this is called "Project Assessment".

According to my example Project Assessment will be:

• How many users want to login simultaneously.
• What is the Bottleneck(Limitation) of the application at the time of login.
• Is the system is able to handle the load?
• Like this,According to the modules we have to identify all the scenario related to the application.

Step II :How we will start our performance testing?what is the basic milestones to start the performance testing?this is called "Planning The Test".
According to my example Planning the test.
Initially if i am taking 50 VU how much time user will think to do the next operation(Think Time).

Think Time : Think time is the wait time taken by the users.In the real time if we are logging on some site,in the meanwhile i got some other work so that is the wait time  by the user.

What is the "Response time Bottleneck".
For ex. if i am taking 10 ms response time for 50 VU,have started execution of the script execution but now the response time is 19 ms that means performance is not good for the site.

Like this for all the Scenarios or Modules just think on what basis we will start our performance test plan?

Step III :Now the test plan is ready we have to start the plan execution using any tool,Techniques or any real time execution.this is called "Implementation of the test".

According to example test plan is ready so i will start the execution using tool,techniques.

Step IV : Test execution is completed so start the analysis on the basis of bottlenecks.this is called "Analysis Of the Results".

I have completed execution of the application now i will analysis of the result basis on the bottlenecks and limitation.

• Basis on the Response Time 
• Basis on the Server Load
• Basis on the Think Time
• Basis on the Hits Per Second
• Stability of the application

Step V : The final step is after analysis the results if is not matching the requirement and limitation and the customer is not satisfied with the results then "Refine(Re-Identified) the test ".

If the result is not matched with the requirement then we will start the testing procedure from the beginning.until we will get our original result according to the requirement.