Top 7 Web Performance Tests that Benefits your Applications

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In today’s web service-based environment, it is of paramount importance to understand different types of testing and their benefits. Just as automobile engineers need the right tools to build a car, performance testers need the right tests to analyze the web performance. Get to know the types of web performance tests and the benefits that they can provide you.

Find below the Top 7 Web Performance Tests:

Capacity Test:

This capacity test will help you to determine the number of users at a time your application can handle and perform at an optimum level before the performance becomes unacceptable. With this capacity test, you will know the exact number of users that your application can handle and will help you to determine your website’s capacity and give you a better understanding of events, which might push your website’s performance to the limits. This test will help you to avoid major problems in the future concerning web traffic.

Performance Test:

Performance test is a type of testing that determines your web application’s reliability, stability, responsiveness, scalability, and throughput of a system under a given workload. Usually, the performance test is conducted to accomplish critical aspects that include: assess production readiness; compare performance characteristics of multiple systems; find the source of performance problems; evaluate against performance criteria; support system tuning; and find throughput levels.

Load Test:

The name itself tells you that it is about applying the load to an application and measures the consequent results. This test helps to identify the maximum operating capacity of web applications and see if there are any bottlenecks that may interfere its operations at capacity.

The best way to approach a load testing on an application is by identifying performance-critical scenarios; identifying the workload profile; identifying the key metrics collected to verify them against performance objectives; designing of tests to simulate the actual load; and more. This load test is performed by using iterative testing to achieve the performance objectives.

Stress Test:

This web performance test determines the application beyond normal load conditions. The main objective of stress testing is to identify critical issues that arise under extreme conditions. Some of these conditions include high concurrency; heavy loads, or limited computational resources. This stress test helps you to unearth timing bugs, synchronization, priority problems, interlock problems, and resource loss bugs. Here the idea is to create a stressful environment for a system that pushes to the breaking point in order to find bugs that are harmful for the application.

Soak Test:

This is one of the longest running tests in a web performance based tests. This soak test helps to determine the actual performance of the application over a period. For instance, you will see that an application will work great for a couple of hours and then all of a sudden it starts to experience problems. It is here where soak tests come into the picture to track down memory leaks or corruption.

Smoke Test:

This is one of the easiest ways to test the performance of your application. If your application does not pass this test, then there is no need for further testing. In this smoke test, the test is run under a very low load that highlights the application works according to expectations. This term of ‘Smoke Test’ originated in the electronics industry – ‘simple application of power to an electric component’. If smoke is generated, then there is no necessary of further tests, as the component failed in the simplest of tests. For instance, if you find correlation issues in your script – and if you can do a single user test successfully, then the scenario is robust. It is better to conduct this smoke test which is simpler than running bigger test to ensure the test is valid.

Component Test:

In this component test, your entire application is not required, only a discrete component is enough. Here the testing of each component of your application is done separately. Component testing is also known as program testing and module testing. The test is performed to find the defects in the program to verify the functioning of the software. Examples of components include chat feature, email function, shopping cart, file upload, search function, and more.

Conclusion:

Performing the above-mentioned web performance tests will help you to determine the overall robustness, reliability, and scalability of your application. Conduct these tests to get a better understanding of your application under various scenarios and what needs to be done to improve the application.