Types of Performance Testing
In this blog post, we will see about types of performance testing. The main objective of performance testing is to ensure your application behaves as intended under various loads and vigorous circumstances. There are around seven types of Performance Testing which help us to study the behavior of applications.
1. Load Testing
Load Testing help us to study the behavior of the application under various loads. The main parameter to focus is response time. This study reveals how the application handles concurrent users effectively.
Main parameter to focus: Response Time
2. Stress Testing
Stress Testing help us to observe the stability of the application. The main intention is to identify the breaking point of the server. The main parameter to focus is throughput (how much data is being transferred between client and server)
Main parameter to focus: Response Time and Throughput
3. Endurance Testing
Endurance testing reveals about memory utilization when you load your test for prolong executions. Say if you execute your test 1 hour to perform load testing. But in endurance testing, you execute your test at least for 8 hours with significant load.
Main parameter to focus: Memory
4. Spike Testing
Spike Testing is performed by sudden increase/decrease in load and observing the behavior of the application. This help us to determine whether the application can handle or not under significant changes in the load.
Main parameter to focus: Response Time
5. Volume Testing
Volume Testing is performance to identify whether the server can handle more number of high complex queries under significant load. The main intention is to observe how the database acts under various circumstances.
Main parameter to focus: Response Time of Queries
6. Availability Testing
This test ensures whether the application is available 24x7x365 days. If you would’ve noticed any website hosting providers, they advertise as 99.9 per cent up time. Availability testing helps us to determine whether the application is up and running fine without any issues.
Main parameter to focus: Response Time
7. Scalability Testing
Say, your website has 1000 visitors per month with 10% increase in unique visitors. By forecasting the number of visitors by expected business growth and performing the load test is called scalability testing.
Main parameter to focus: Response Time and Maximum Transactions Per Second
In next blog post we will see what is workload and how to design workload model for load and stress testing.