Introduction
What is Testing?
Apache Benchmark (ab) and Siege are two tools that help us to accomplish load tests. Load tests are important elements in conducting stress and performance tests. Roughly speaking...
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For more info on the differences between these types of tests, check out http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2005/02/performance-vs-load-vs-stress-testing.html.
Setting Benchmarks
We are primarily concerned with performance testing. At the beginning of a project, certain benchmarks should be set from conversing with a client.
- What does peak traffic look like on their existing site?
- What extra requests could we expect from new features? (ex: a feature that communicates with an external resource will consume resources differently than a new static page)
- How fast do certain pages need to load?
- How
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- responsive do certain features need to be? (ex: do notifications need to be sent from a site immediately after an action, or can we batch them for later delivery?)
Once we've made some estimates on the performance benchmarks that we need to hit, we can design a series of load tests to see how our application behaves as it strives to meet those benchmarks.
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