Learning Performance Testing

[Kim]

Hello all,

I am learning a bit about performance testing recently and thought I would share how we approached a load testing need/problem and to hopefully get some more tips and tricks. 🙂

The performance test we did was for a re-launch of a website.

First step was to define reasons as to why we wanted to load and performance test the website:
1. Ensure new infrastructure is reliable and responsive
2. Find maximum capacity so as to respond adequately to traffic spikes

We then set Load Testing objectives:
1. Handle up to 1000 users per hour (~20% more than the greatest load experienced so far).
2. 200 users should be able to use the site simultaneously.
3. Error rate below 1%

Then we used existing google analytic metrics to analyse a typical user journey through the website and blog, for example:
Blog: The average user reads 1.3 articles, so the test will ensure 2 articles are read.
In this journey the test will:
Navigate to the root domain
Navigate to /blog
Navigate to an article
Navigate to a related article
Leave the site

We had a couple of these scenarios ranging from simple as above to more complex.
Following those tests we added 2 more:
1. A final test journey is a random selection of URLs from the sitemap to more accurately represent user indecisiveness and randomosity.
2. Programmatically; load the sitemap XML, parse it, create HTTP requests

Issues we had:
1. Local machines were bottlenecks – JVM and internet could not keep up with large number of requests
2. Development work stopped by excessive testing – slowed the manual test environment down
3. Maths (because threads, ramping up times etc were new to us)

How do you approach load and performance testing? Any tips for a newbie in the field?

[Thanh]

@Kim,
Thanks for sharing.
I’m curious to know more about Performance testing…what is your favorite source to learn performance testing?

[crystal]

Thanks for sharing Kim.Looking forward for your new posts regarding performance testing.

[Author]

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