Performance Testing

There are 3 main concerns that performance testing seeks to address.
These concerns form the acceptance criteria or metrices for the tests.
They are:
  1. User concern – Response Time
  2. Business concern - Throughput. E.g. requests/ sec; calls/ day
  3. System concern - Resource Utilisation (often overlooked). E.g. processor & memory utilisation; disk I/O; network I/O

Purpose of Performance Testing

Depending on what has been done, performance testing helps in assessing:

  1. release readiness
  2. infrastructure adequacy
  3. software performance
  4. performance tuning efficiency

Some Definitions


  • Performance Target = Performance Goals
  • Performance Requirements = contractual obligation, SLAs that cannot be compromised. = Performance Thresholds
  • Workload = Stimulus applied. E.g. number of users, concurrent users, data volume, transaction volume.

Types of Performance Testing


  • Load Testing - testing within anticipated production load/ volume
  • Stress Testing - testing beyond expected production load/ volume. Objective is to reveal application bugs that will only surface under load. E.g. synchronisation issues, race conditions, memory leaks.

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