web application load stress and performance testing

Performance testing is a type of testing to evaluate the speed, responsiveness and stability of an application under load. The goal of the performance testing in Agile testing has been to ensure application behaves well under expected load and it aims to find performance related issues in application. It helps to identify loopholes and bottlenecks which may arise when the page or application is stressed out.

There are different types of performance testing, which can be employed depending on the projected business need.

Load testing checks the application’s ability to perform under-anticipated user loads. The objective is to identify performance bottlenecks.

Stress tests involve testing an application under extreme workloads to see how it handles high traffic or data processing. The objective is to identify the breaking point of an application.

One to make sure the software can handle the expected load over a long period of time.

Spike testing tests the software’s reaction to sudden large spikes in the generated load.

The objective is to check the application’s performance under varying database volumes.

The objective of scalability testing is to determine the effectiveness in “scaling up” to support an increase in the load. It helps to plan capacity additions to the existing system.

After we have decided the type of performance testing required for our platform, the most important question arises is which tools to use? There are tons of load test tools available in the market, few are open source and few are closed. But based on the requirement we would be looking below for the major tools which are popular, serve multiple purposes and help us to get the best results out of our performance test.