Types of Performance Testing
Overview
There are different types of Performance Testing. Performance testing is non-functional testing. In this type of testing, the application’s functionality is not tested.
Performance testing is carried out to check whether the system’s non-functional requirements are satisfied. Non-functional performance requirements of the applications are tested.
In real-time, multiple concurrent users would access the web application/web services concurrently. So, performance testing is very important.
Types of Performance Testing
Some of the types of Performance testing are as follows:
- Stress Testing
- Load Testing
- Spike Testing
- Capacity Testing/Scalability Testing
- Soak Testing
Stress Testing
Stress testing is also known as endurance testing. Testing the application under abnormal and extreme conditions and checking the application behavior. The main reason for this kind of testing is to determine the safe usage limits of the application under test.
Stress testing evaluates system performance when it is stressed for short periods. Stress tests are black box tests designed to impose a range of abnormal input conditions to stress the software’s capabilities.
Load Testing
Load testing is a type of performance testing used to determine the application performance under normal real production load. Load testing is done for multi-user systems like web applications/web services.
For example, in the load testing technique, we will check the web page load times of the web application under concurrent user load that mimics the production 1x load( Concurrent virtual users that is equivalent to the production load). Load testing will check the application and page load times under concurrent user load. This is to ensure that the page loads faster than the agreed SLAs.
Spike Testing
Testing the website for unusual spikes in traffic. For example, An e-commerce website would get a 4x spike in traffic in the production load during the festive season. In spike testing, we will test the application under spike, for example, 3x, 4x, 5x.etc production loads. We will check if the application sustains the spike traffic.
Soak Testing
In Soak testing the application is tested for long periods usually 24hr, 3 days soak, or persistence tests. In this testing, we check if the application sustains continuous production load for long periods.
Capacity Testing
Capacity Testing is done to know the limits of the system. This testing is used for Capacity planning based on the application forecasts and to support future application performance requirements.
—
Software Testing Tutorials:
https://www.testingdocs.com/software-testing-tutorials/