Checklist for Powerful Performance Testing

What is Performance Testing?

Performance Testing is the process of determining the behavior of the application under the workload. This behavior typically includes Speed, Responsiveness, and Stability.

Keep in Mind

Before doing performance testing for a web application, you should have a mindset that performance issues can mess up the usability of the application. After all, no one wants to use an application that is slow and irresponsive.

Performance Testing mainly includes load testing, stress testing, and volume testing. Let's say we have an application under test with the following requirement of performance testing.

Requirement: Analyzing the performance of the application(end-to-end flows) under normal, average, and peak conditions of load.

What to do to achieve this goal?

• Analyzing response of the application under load in form of concurrent user.

• Analyzing the database connections by applying stress in form of multiple requests to DB.

• Finding a threshold for the maximum amount of users that the application is capable of handling. Determining the breakpoints in our application.

• Checking the Response time of application under load.

• Finding the ways to recover from the breaks and crashes that happen if the load is increased.

• Filtering the APIs which fail when the load is increased.

• Making sure that the proper request time-outs and response codes are set for APIs.

Checklist for Performance Testing:

1. Testing the stability of the application under different loads(Varying the number of concurrent users)

2. Testing the speed of the application under different loads.

3. Identifying the performance issues in the application related to both FE, DB, and BE.

4. Testing the end-to-end flows instead of single APIs under load, to make sure the flow doesn’t break.

5. Use real users instead of virtual ones in the performance testing tools(e.g. JMeter) by logging in with data of numerous users at the same time.

6. Testing if the database connections are exceeding the limit when multiple requests are sent at the same time.

7. Testing the application against different concurrency conditions over the time span of ten to fifteen minutes.

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