Load Testing

Overview

Most owners and providers of products and solutions don’t put performance issues on considering cap in the course of product development until they face them as they are. To solve these issues, when they have already emerged can be much more expensive than to identify them at the stage of development. Load testing is used to avoid such issues.

Load testing offers answers to the following questions:

• What’s the performance at the present moment?
• What sorts of performance problems exist?
• How will the performance vary if the number of the users doubles (triples, etc.)?
• How will the performance vary if the size of the data doubles (triples, etc.)?
• How will the performance vary if some solution is applied, the configuration is changed or a component/service is added?
• How will the application behave in critical situations?
• What type of hardware do I need to support certain number of system users?

The answers to these questions make it possible for the owners of the products and solutions to feel certain that they won’t have to tackle any performance issues after the system is entered into service.

Our Expertise

There is a team of highly competent quality assurance engineers who perform load testing in our Company. Our goal is to highlight bottlenecks of an application, decide on the performance criteria, and if necessary provide our clients with guidance on using and setting up the application to achieve maximum performance.

Our QA specialists perform six types of load tests:

• Performance testing;

This is the main test type that is planned to be performed for a project. It answers the question ‘how long does it take for the system to respond if there is a predefined load?’ In other words, it is identification of the system functioning problems with the load which is comparable with a real application load. System response time is measured.

• Load testing;

This type of tests shows how response time (RT) or number of transactions per second (NTS) change along with changing the number of virtual users in the system. Special load generator creates virtual users who perform system calls to functionality and thus put some load on server.

• Volume testing;

This test type is correlated with performance tests very closely for the given application. As a result of volume testing we obtain information about how the main performance metrics change (RT, NTS, etc.) when the application is working with extremely huge amount of data in the database or somewhere else.

• Stress testing;

The goals of such tests may be to ensure the software doesn't crash in conditions of insufficient computational resources. Stress tests refer to tests that put a greater emphasis on robustness, availability, and error handling under a heavy load.

• Scalability testing;

Means testing of a software application for measuring its capability to scale up or scale down in terms of any of its non-functional parameters (number of users supported, number of transactions, data volume, etc.).

• Recovery testing

Shows how well the application is able to recover from crashes, hardware failures and other similar problems.

Deliverables

• Detailed report on the results of the performed load testing;
• Detailed report on the revealed bottlenecks of the system;
• Report on the recommendations for system performance improvement.

Instruments

To perform load testing we use such instruments as:

• Mercury(HP) LoadRunner 9.0;
• WebLOAD 8.1;
• RationalRobot 7.0.

We can also use any other tools for load testing if there are project needs.