Performance Testing - What is It and What is Its Need?

There are three stages in website (Company websites that get too much of traffic) development. First stage is ‘Creation’, where a set of programmers from the development team create a website according to the requirements of the client. Second stage is ‘Testing’, where a set of programmers from the testing team test the website to check that the website satisfies Service Level Agreements as specified by the client. The last step is deployment where the website is deployed into the client servers and maintenance activity thereafter is also done.

Stages of testing

Testing consists of two stages: the first stage is functional testing, wherein the website is tested for functionalities; the second stage is performance testing.In performance testing, the website is tested for its efficiency. The server in which it is tested is similar to the client server and the environment simulated is also similar to the client environment. This way, it is ensured that the website’s efficiency when tested under SVT (Stress Volume Testing) conditions will correspond to the efficiency of the website when deployed in production (Client server) conditions.

How is performance testing done

1. ‘Vusers’ also called as Virtual users, are created by the performance testing tool and fired at the website.  The Load on the website is defined as the number of Vusers simulated.
2. The response times and results are obtained and compared with the expected values.
3. It there is any deviation from the expected results, the bug in the code that causes the problem is reported to the development team and the bug is removed.
4. The website is performance-tested again to ensure that the bug fix is successful.

Various methods of performance testing

1. Smoke testing – Smoke testing is done when the website is created and performance tested for the first time, to set a benchmark, so that this value can be compared with the upcoming releases to identify whether the upgrades affect the website efficiency in any way.
2. Load testing – Load testing is done to find out how the website behaves under normal conditions, i.e., normal load (number of users) similar to production environment is simulated. Normally load testing is done for an hour.
3. Stress testing – Stress testing is done to find the maximum number of users the website can service at any given time, beyond which, the website crashes.
4. Endurance testing – Endurance testing is done to find out how long the website can service the normal load of people or how many users it can handle for an expanded span of time before crashing. Endurance testing is normally done for eight hours.

Why is performance testing done

Sometimes, even if the website functions properly for the said functionalities, it may fail at the client side for apparently no reason at all, when released live. This cannot be attributed to the bugs in the code (if any), but the infrastructure of the hosting server itself. Hence, by performance testing a website before going live, its limits can be found out and the website can be made to function within its limits.