What is Performance Testing?

It is in general testing performed to determine how 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

Types Of Performance Testing

1. Load Testing
2. Stress Testing
3. Endurance Testing
4. Spike Testing
5. Configuration Testing
6. Volume Testing

Load Testing: Load Testing is the simplest form of performance testing. A Load test is usually conducted to understand the behavior of the system under a specific expected load . This load can be expected concurrent number of users on the application performing a specific number of transactions within the set duration . This test will give out the response times of all the important business transactions. If the database, application server, etc also monitored, then this simple test can itself point towards any bottlenecks in the application software.

Stress Testing: Stress Testing is normally used to understand the upper limits of capacity within the system . This kind of test is done to determine the systems the robustness in terms of extreme load and helps application administrators to determine if the system will perform sufficiently if the current load goes well above the expected maximum.

Endurance Testing: Endurance Testing is usually done to determine if the system can sustain the continuous expected load. During Endurance test memory utilization is monitored to detect potential leaks.

Spike Testing: Spike Testing is done by suddenly increasing the number of or load generated by , users by large amount and observing the behavior of the system.

Configuration Testing: Rather than testing for performance from the perspective of load , tests are created to determine the effects of configuration changes to the systems performance and behavior. A common example would be experimenting with different methods of load balancing.

Volume Testing: Volume testing refers to testing a software application with a certain amount of data. This amount can, in generic terms, be the database size or it could also be the size of an interface file that is the subject of volume testing. For example, if you want to volume test your application with a specific database size, you will expand your database to that size and then test the applications performance on it..