Performance Testing

                                                         Performance Testing

In software engineering, performance testing is in general, a testing practice performed to determine how a system performs in terms of responsiveness and stability under a particular workload. It can also serve to investigate, measure, validate or verify other quality attributes of the system, such as scalability, reliability and resource usage.

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

Contents

•  Testing types
• 1.1 Load testing
• 1.2 Stress testing
• 1.3 Soak testing
• 1.4 Spike testing
• 1.5 Breakpoint testing
• 1.6 Configuration testing
• 1.7 Isolation testing
• 1.8 Internet testing

In performance testing, it is often crucial for the test conditions to be similar to the expected actual use. However, in practice this is hard to arrange and not wholly possible, since production systems are subjected to unpredictable workloads. Test workloads may mimic occurrences in the production environment as far as possible, but only in the simplest systems can one exactly replicate this workload variability.

Loosely-coupled architectural implementations (e.g.: SOA) have created additional complexities with performance testing. To truly replicate production-like states, enterprise services or assets that share a common infrastructure or platform require coordinated performance testing, with all consumers creating production-like transaction volumes and load on shared infrastructures or platforms. Because this activity is so complex and costly in money and time, some organizations now use tools to monitor and simulate production-like conditions (also referred as "noise") in their performance testing environments (PTE) to understand capacity and resource requirements and verify / validate quality attributes.