The objectives of load testing
The main objectives of load testing are:
- Performance evaluation and application health at a stage of development and transfer of operation
- Performance evaluation and application health at the stage of registration of new releases, patch sets
- Performance optimization applications, including server configuration, and code optimization
- Selection of appropriate hardware for the application (software platform) and server configuration
Note that within a single goal can be used by different types of performance tests and load, for example, for the first, second and third goals to produce a performance testing and testing stability. But with planning exercise testing is still more logical to start from technical purposes (and not commercial, above), which is achieved as a result of testing and classification tests on them:
- If you are interested in research productivity applications, namely, the response times for operations on different loads in a fairly wide range, including stress load it all the same Performance Testing
- If the goal is to understand how the application is stable in the regime of prolonged use (except for memory leaks, incorrect configuration settings, etc.) then conducted a long stress test – Stability Testing. The analysis of response times can occur, but not be the first priority, above the system "fell."
- Stress Testing aims to verify whether the system is returned after the exorbitant burden (and how soon) to normal, and stress testing purposes may be testing the system’s behavior in cases where one of the servers in the application pool stops working, change the hardware crashes configuration database server, etc. Note also that the stress test does not check the performance of the system and its ability to regenerate after excess load.
The main thing after all is to understand the purpose of a test and try to reach them.
See Also