Performance testing is to test the performance of an application at different loads to determine the response times, stability and scalability of the application. There are different types of performance testing which we will explain in detail here.
Types of Performance Testing
Load Testing
Load testing is one of basic type of performance testing where we put the load on the application with different load testing tools such as Loadrunner and monitor the response time of the application.
Stress Testing
Stress testing is done to find the stability of the application with heavy loads on the application and to determine the breaking points of the applications during the heavy load.
Endurance Testing or Soak Testing
Endurance testing is also called soak testing which is done to check if the system can able to work on the continuous work load for longer periods and also to monitor the potential memory leaks during the endurance testing. During Endurance testing you should also monitor the response time and the throughput of the application throughout the testing. The response times and throughput should be constant throughout the test.
Volume Testing
This is a type of testing where a huge volume of data is inserted in the database, which will increase during a period of years, and test the performance of the application. This helps to find how the application behaves during the huge volume of data.
Scalability Testing
Scalability testing is a type of testing done to determine if a sudden increase in hardware, cpu cycles and change in software to meet the increase in loads. Suppose if a company expects a huge load on the server. This leads to sudden increase of the hardware in order to meet the demand. One should check how the application is performing during the change of hardware to meet the new demands.
Spike Testing
Spike testing is done by sudden increasing in the load during the test. This type of test is done to determine how the application is behaving during the increase of the load in terms of response times.
Capacity Testing
Capacity testing is done in conjunction with the capacity planning in order to determine the future loads in terms of users and increase in volume of data. It is just doing a load testing in order to find how much processing, memory, network etc.
Configuration Testing
This type of testing is done by changing different configuration in the web server, application and data base server and observing the performance of the application
Isolation Testing
Isolating is not specific to performance testing, this type of testing is done to determine the exact bottleneck in the application and to isolate the bottleneck.
Benchmark Testing
It is a type of testing done by fine tuning the database queries in order to increase the performance of the application.