Information sharing across distances was the original goal of the internet. However, this innovation leads to more users, quicker speeds, and more data. That is why the concern is whether your website’s applications can handle the load, the traffic you want, and your users’ many calls and requests.
Therefore, performing web performance tests is essential to maintaining an excellent user experience for your consumers. But what type of web performance tests should you do, what’s the difference between performance, stress load, and capacity testing, and which tests are appropriate for specific situations? In this article, we will present an explanation of these questions.
Performance Testing
It is the practice of examining how a system performs regarding responsiveness and stability under a specific workload. Software performance testing investigates your software and infrastructure’s responsiveness, stability, scalability, dependability, speed, and resource utilization.
Keep in mind different performance tests yield different data. Thus, it is critical to know your business goals before performing performance testing.
When To Use Performance Testing?
It is perfect to use this when testing your website, app, test servers, databases, and network. After performance tests, you may analyze KPIs like hits per second, response time, latency, virtual users, errors per second, throughput, and correlations. Test reports let you find bottlenecks, defects, and failures and decide what to do.
Capacity Testing
Capacity tests (also known as scalability testing) establish how many users your program can handle before performance or stability suffers. Knowing how many people your application can handle successfully will help you spot occurrences that could overload your site.
When to Use Capacity Testing?
Since capacity testing determines whether the application and environment can manage the amount of traffic that was intended, it can be used during the design phase to determine how many users or transactions the system can handle under a given set of conditions.
Load Testing
Load testing replicates real-world loads on software, apps, and websites. Hence, the test evaluates system performance under excessive load.
When To Use Load Testing?
Load test to determine your system’s user capacity. You may mimic user situations to test different components of your system.
You can choose how the load behaves from different geo-locations or builds up and levels out. Regular load tests should be done to identify if the system needs tuning or hardware and software changes to improve performance.
Stress Testing
Stress testing aims to discover how effectively the environment and application can sustain a target level of effectiveness under adverse situations.
When To Use Stress Testing
Stress testing is particularly useful before deployment when faults like server failures or load balancer misconfigurations can be put into the system to see how it reacts.
Stress testing is also important for determining your system’s breaking point, determining if design parameters have been met, and documenting how the system breaks as load grows.
Radview creates and provides enterprise test automation solutions, testing tools, and performance monitoring for web and mobile applications, allowing businesses to accelerate their Web and Mobile application development and deployment. Contact them here for more information.
