What is Performance Testing
Performance testing is a non-functional testing in which we make sure that a website or application is working as expected under a given number of users.
Whenever there is a sudden or continuous increase in traffic on the website, there are high chances that the server of the website might go down, causing the website to become unresponsive. This can lead to a loss in business and customer trust. To avoid all these kinds of issues, we perform performance testing and try to identify all types of bottlenecks such as scalability, speed, response time, and stability. We then report the findings to developers, who analyze the report, optimize the code, and improve the software's overall performance.
Performance testing helps us ensure the quality of the website and verify whether the developed website complies with the requirements or not.
Why we do Performance Testing
Performance testing helps us in finding the response time, speed and scalability of the application under a given load before the product goes live.
When multiple users start using the application simultaneously then in application user might face issues like slow response time, poor usability and bad user experience, all these issues can be avoided by doing performance testing before the product goes live.
In Performance testing, we replicate real-life scenarios to observe how a website will behave under different numbers of concurrent users. By doing performance testing, we try to find the bottlenecks and ensure that a website's response time, speed, stability, and scalability meet the requirements under a given number of concurrent users.
Types of Performance Testing
Load Testing: In load testing, we make sure if an application is working fine or not under an expected load without any degradation in its performance by finding out all the performance bottlenecks.
Stress Testing: In stress testing, we try to find out how an application is behaving under unfavorable or extreme user traffic. In stress testing, we try to find out the breaking point of the application.
Spike Testing: In spike testing, we check how an application is responding to the sudden increase in user traffic. The objective of spike testing is to check whether an application can handle or not when there is a sudden increase in traffic, without crashing or degradation in performance.
Endurance Testing: In Endurance testing, we check if an application can handle or not continuous load for a longer period, without any failure or degradation in performance. Endurance testing may run for long hours or even for days based on the requirement.
Tools Used for Performance Testing
In most organizations, 2 tools are very popular for performance testing.
JMeter
JMeter is an open-source tool which makes it popular for Performance Testing.
It is supported by different Operation Systems (OS) like Windows, Linux and MacOS and JMeter is designed with the help of JAVA.
JMeter has a user-friendly GUI, which makes it easy to use.
LoadRunner
LoadRunner is not an open-source tool. To use LoadRunner, we will have to purchase the license.
LoadRunner provides a detailed test report, which helps the developers understand and optimize the code to improve the performance of the application.
Conclusion
Performance testing is crucial to ensure smooth website or app operation under various concurrent user loads. Its goal is to identify and fix scalability, response time, speed, and stability bottlenecks, avoiding crashes and bad user experiences. This boosts customer trust and business success. Types like load, stress, spike, and endurance testing assess application behavior in various scenarios.