What is load testing and how does it work ?

For example, you might be interested in observing performance under high load conditions as measured by concurrent users or response time. Perhaps your test scenarios are more focussed on seeing a load balancer in a failover condition while monitoring availability. Or maybe you are using load testing to identify and fix reliability issues such as performance bugs. Other software testing scenarios might include simulating or re-creating performance bottlenecks, as observed in real-time analytics platforms. Load testing can also be used as stress testing to find at what point your system will break. Sometimes load testing acts as a form of regression testing where you can validate your performance requirements have not slipped or fallen below previously agreed targets.

The test measures the performance and response times of a system as demand on a system increases. Tests are most appropriate when carried out in production, measuring the real responsiveness of the system under simulated conditions. Tests can be scheduled or run on-demand, but tests are typically planned for a time when traffic is low so that any problems caused by the heavy traffic will affect the fewest number of actual customers.

Once the application is functionally stable, load testing should be scheduled. The maximum number of concurrent users supported by an application, as well as its scalability, enables additional users to access it. In the end, web traffic has a lot to do with hardware and you have to check how your servers are doing in case of heavy load. How fast will the server respond when it is sent a request from the client?

If you’re considering whether your business needs load testing, here you will find all the in-depth information to make that decision. The first method is longevity testing, which is also known as endurance testing. As definition of load testing the name suggests, this method evaluates a system’s endurance by running moderate workloads for an extended time. For instance, let’s say we have developed an e-commerce web service that people can use simultaneously.

It shall provide confidence in the system and protection against poor performance. Performance testing allows you to pinpoint fundamental issues within your system and is vital for the success of your product. To make sure your product remains well-protected against downtimes and crashes induced by varying user load, request a team of QA professionals to root out all the underlying vulnerabilities of your product. With the help of load testing, you might be able to identify poorly written code structures and queries. By simplifying these code structures, you can achieve 2x greater productivity in most cases and up to 10x times more, in extreme ones.

Other types of load testing are capacity testing, stress testing, and soak testing. Today’s applications are built with multiple technologies, relying on vast networks of third-party providers and CDNs. Additionally, end users can access your site or applications from anywhere in the world using different browsers, operating systems, and mobile devices, all with varying connection speeds. Response times, quality, and availability are critical factors that should be assessed before pushing applications into production. That is the whole point when load testing or API monitoring your website and applications.

Software testers use scalability testing to determine an application’s ability to scale up, depending on the increase in user load. It helps to identify the system’s ability to adapt to increasing user loads. Using the e-commerce web service example from load testing, we will test the web service on a much broader scope. Instead of creating testing scenarios based on user load, we will set various benchmarks and performance standards for each feature of the application.

What are the differences between load testing and performance testing?

Care must be taken during this test as there is a great risk of catastrophic failure if incorrectly carried out. The item is not operated through all configurations as it is not a requirement of this test. LoadRunner is another product produced by a software giant in Micro Focus. The companies’ website has a helpful resource page that details a guide, white-paper, brochure, and case studies that help get a better picture of the software. Load tests seek to discover how the system performs under normal conditions.

It tests the application by creating virtual users to simulate normal and peak network traffic conditions. The tool simulates a production environment and displays graphical results. Load testing is an essential part of modern development and operations as it helps teams build and deploy software with confidence in production environments. The impact of not thoroughly load testing your products is often experienced as a loss https://globalcloudteam.com/ of customers, revenue, or even integrity and trust in your brand. The paid load testing tools are used to support many protocols; therefore, it can implement various types of applications like Streaming Media, ERP/CRM, etc. Furthermore, the application is likely to run into issues such as slow response times, inconsistent performance on changing platforms, poor usability, and failure to work under increasing user loads.

Mechanical load testing

According to Gartner, network downtime can cost around $5,600 per minute, on average. With the help of load testing, we can avoid these costs and ensure that an application is only deployed when it’s ready. For instance, it’s possible for computers to have high RAM but slow processor to support it. With load testing, testers can understand how many processes the machine can run while maintaining optimal performance.

• Load testing tools created in-house − An organization that recognizes the value of load testing may develop its own load testing technologies.
• Other load testing tools, such as BlazeMeter or Flood, utilize JMeter.
• It helps companies give crucial insight to stakeholders about the performance, speed, stability, scalability, and reliability of an application.
• As such, this testing is most relevant for multi-user systems; often one built using a client/server model, such as web servers.
• Some scenarios may simulate real users in the system, while others may simply generate massive amounts of simultaneous GET requests.
• LoadRunner can also interface directly with databases and even network protocols.
• Although stress testing is meant to test an application’s performance under user load, it does that in conditions that go beyond the system’s capacity.

Furthermore, it’s important that we are able to map user actions to parts of our application. LoadNinja is a good choice for enterprise users that are looking to integrate their application into SmartBear’s software products. You can do regression testing by re-running the suite of functional tests. This ensures new features do not have a negative impact on current features or application functionality.

Improved scalability

Performance testing mobile apps can be performed in the same manner as testing for desktop or web-based applications. If the app is simply local and does not require a network connection, then load testing may not be a very valid form of testing for your mobile app. The performance testing life cycle describes the process of arriving at one or more of a series of tests that should be performed for measuring metrics of an application over time. Load testing is important because it identifies points of failure in your system and can also show you how your site degrades as more simultaneous users are added.

QA load testing is often performed using software automation like Jenkins within an environment using continuous integration. Load testing software consists of generating user load on a software system. As software systems become more complex, with many layers and components, software tests may consist of many different types of tests, including Postman load testing. Software load tests may also run on a system, or they may isolate one or more components of the software architecture.

Performance testing and Load Testing – Are the same?

The resource can be anything related to your application or system under test but is often a measure of real simulated users accessing your application, such as your web site, for example. Not to be confused with active users, concurrent users are more often a subset of all unique/active users accessing a web site. To summarize, load testing is a subset of performance testing and covers performance issues related to varying user loads. On the other hand, performance has a much larger scope, and it helps testers to highlight the overall performance issues of the system by setting benchmarks for each scenario. As a result, it is easier for testers to figure out the upper limit of all major components of applications, such as database, network applications, hardware, etc.

One major consideration we mentioned earlier is if you are measuring client-side activity, or more specifically, Web 2.0 technologies. It is very important when it comes time for simulating user actions, like navigating, button clicks, entering date within forms, etc. If this is the case, the tool you choose should replicate this as close as possible using real browsers, because that is what your users are using.

How to do load testing?

When not writing in-depth articles, Vejune enjoys spending time in nature and watching classic sci-fi movies. For more information on your data processing please read our Privacy Policy. After fixing the noted issues, testers replay the test to get accurate results. Oxy Proxy Manager for Android Free Android proxy manager app that works with any proxy provider.Proxy Rotator Add-on Rotates your Datacenter Proxies to help increase success rates. 5000 users logging in, issuing orders, purchasing items and logging out in the middle of a sale. Reduces the danger of system downtime by increasing the system’s scalability.

Load Testing vs. Performance Testing

Additionally, we’ll provide examples, tools, context, and how load testing fits into the software testing environment. Generally, load testing is used to signify how many concurrent users handle the application and the application’s scale in terms of hardware, network capacity etc. In software testing, load testing is an integral part of performance testing under non-functional testing. While load testing requires simulating traffic load as organically as possible, residential proxies can be the most effective solution to fulfill this goal. As they come from numerous consented users with unique IPs from every corner around the world, residential proxies provide the possibility to mimic organic conditions in load testing.

Another possibility is that the financial report generation should take between seconds. It’s important to know if there are any set response timeouts in your application. If the timeouts are set below what users are experiencing, then there is a problem. Flood supports a wide selection of load testing tools and deployment options, from cloud to on-premise, and easy to understand load testing guides. While being budget-friendly, they also might not be as sophisticated as the licensed ones. It plays an essential role in defining how well the back-end system, like a server, or the front-end system, like a website, perform under certain traffic loads.

Best Practices for Load Testing

You can often use these indications for drilling down and finding the exact cause of the slowdown. Performance testing typically gauges different metrics related to the performance of a website or web application. Website testing measures page load speeds, time to first byte, time to interaction, and other metrics. Performance testing, as it relates to load testing, typically records how these metrics are impacted by adding additional demand onto the system. After running a test, you can identify which components impacted the results and tweak those components for improving website performance. JMeter and Gatling are purpose-built performance tools that generate load on the HTTP protocol level.

Many of the load testing tools are licensed and charge a good amount of money for the license. In the end, load testing could save your organization from costly performance errors. I hope this article has helped to explain what load testing is, how it compares to other types of testing, what the tools are, and how an application could be load tested.

Stay up to date with the latest in software development with Stackify’s Developer Thingsnewsletter. A strong understanding of future goals for scope and volume will draw clear guidelines to inform the process. Evaluating a piece of software or a website before deployment can highlight bottlenecks, allowing them to be addressed before they incur large real-world costs. Evaluating an airline’s website that will be launching a flight promotion offer and is expecting 10,000+ users at a time. Cyclical testing consists of repeated loading and unloading for specified cycles, durations and conditions.

IT, Finance, Services, Retail, Government, Media, Communications, Utilities, Gaming, and even Construction industries all tend to load test. Throughput metrics are most commonly expressed as a rate, such as the average amount of network throughput in bits per second or the number of transactions that have passed or failed per minute. But before we execute the load test scenarios, we have to set the different configurations and matrices to collect the information. Once we successfully create the load test scenarios, we will execute the particular test scenarios. And then, we create the load test scenarios, which ensure the success criteria are finalized. The reliability of response time concludes the past period should be logged and the same should be compared with several test runs.

At Flood, we support over 15 geographical regions in multiple cloud environments, including AWS and Azure, as well as the option to run from your on-premise or other cloud infrastructure using Flood Agent. We place no limit on how or where you choose to run your load generators, and it is entirely up to you. It is used to govern the scalability of the application and allows various users to access it. An ever-smiling full-stack developer, specializing in the rapid development of custom web applications.