How to conduct Stress Test?

During Performance testing, stress test has its own place to find out the uppercut of application capability. But what is the approach you should follow to conduct Stress and then conclude the result? Kirk Pepperdine has articulated these stuff very well in his article.  

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Stress Test: The main idea behind stress testing is to determine the failure of the system. Stress testing is a kind of negative testing where we load the software with a large number of concurrent users/processes which cannot be handled by the systems hardware resources. This testing is also known as Fatigue testing. It puts greater emphasis on robustness, availability, and error handling under a heavy load, rather than on what would be considered correct behaviour under normal circumstances.

Impact of Cache on Application Performance

Cached data is nothing but files, images, scripts and other media files stored on your devices by the website or app. Data is stored on your devices in a reserved space, so the next time when you are visiting the app or website, information is already available. Cache plays an important role in Performance Testing World. Because to improve the application's performance cache helps a lot! How? Read the LinkedIn article shared by Deepanshu Mittal: 

LinkedIn Article Link

Identification of Performance Bottleneck

Identification of performance bottleneck is an art and how a performance tester can enhance his/her skill to identify the bottlenecks is very well articulated by Scott Barber. Read this article to know what are the usual performance bottleneck and how to detect them?

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Performance Bottleneck: Performance Bottlenecks are the causes which degrade the system or application performance in term of slowness in response time, low throughput, low user load etc.

Common Mistakes in Performance Testing

Hi Expert,

Today, I am sharing the common mistake which we do during performance testing planning, preparation and execution. There are 13 common mistakes which are listed by Mark D Anderson. If you are aware of these mistakes then you can save time and effort.

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Performance Improvement from 10 to 1 to 0.1

Response Time; a simple but one of the key terms in performance testing world. During performance testing window; all the conversations are revolved around this key metric to meet it and post-testing the work started to tune it (if issue found). Response Time is a first and foremost metric which we consider in PT. But do you know what are the categories in which you can categorize the response time and on that basis, you can divide the responsiveness of your AUT (application under test) or pages? 

These categories have been followed since long back and today I am sharing an old article (1993) which described it in brief. I guess some of you would have not been born when this article was written. This article will help you once you started thinking as a performance engineer and how you can jump the AUT from 10 to 1 and 1 to 0.1?

Refer the link to read the article.          

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Requirement vs Goal vs Objective

1. Performance requirements - criteria that are absolutely non-negotiable due to contractual obligations, service level agreements or business needs. Only those criteria whose sub-par performance would unquestionably lead to a decision to delay a release are absolutely required.

2. Performance goals - criteria desired for release, but negotiable under certain circumstances. For instance, if a response time goal for a particular transaction is set at 3 seconds, but the actual response time is determined to be 3.3 seconds, it is likely stakeholders will choose to release the application and defer performance tuning of that transaction for a future release.

3. Performance testing objectives - items that add value to the team through the process of performance testing but are not intrinsically quantitative. For example, one objective might be to provide certain data to systems administrators to assist them in tuning systems under their purview. Another objective might be to determine peak application usage that the existing network can support.

The above content has been taken from a white paper "Get performance requirements right - think like a user" written by Scott Barber and published by Compuware. The reference document can be accessed via this link.

Beyond Performance Testing

Performance Engineering; a trendy domain in PT world. Performance Engineering is a vast field which requires a deep knowledge of technology, application, architecture, integration and many more things. 

I always get one question from the performance tester that he/she wants to move in the performance engineering field, but do know how to start?

Today, I am going to share the Bible of Performance Engineering named "Beyond Performance Testing" written by R. Scott Barber. Actually, these are the PDF links covering all the basic and advanced topics of performance engineering. I am sharing you the link of Introduction page in which all the links are given. So, read it and learn the PE concepts:

Beyond Performance Testing

Microservices implementation in DevOps

Some time back I have shared an important article on microservices and it's architecture, to continue the same topic today, I am sharing another article published by Neotys on Microservices implementation in DevOps.     

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What is DevOps?

DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support.

What are Microservices?

Actually, microservice is a loosely coupled program which is grouped and formed a microservices architecture. Microservice Architecture is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of small autonomous services (microservices), modelled around a business domain. 

A case study of performance tuning

Again, the last day of the working week! 

Today, I will share a case study which is sent to me by Mohan to circulate to a wider audience so that everybody can get the benefit. This case study is on Netflix online video streaming tool and worth to read.

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Thread Dump Analysis Tips

gceasy always provide informative articles in its blog. I found another good post which may help you to identify the critical path using Thread Dump Analysis with best practice. Read this post and get the knowledge:

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Additional Details: Thread Dump is a snapshot of the status of all the threads at a particular time. Thread dumps are vital artefacts to diagnose CPU spikes, deadlocks, poor response times, memory problems, unresponsive applications, and other system problems. Thread Dump helps to find out what every thread in the JVM is doing at a particular point in time. Are some threads stuck in deadlock? Are all the threads running? Which threads are waiting for the blocked resources etc? All these questions can be answered by analysing in the thread dump.

Related Topic: Thread Dump Analysis

GC Duration vs GC Pause Duration

In Garbage Collection, there are two important terms, GC Duration and GC Pause Duration. Which duration we need to refer before tuning the application? Refer the link to understand the same:

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Garbage Collection: A Garbage Collector is a Java program which tracked the referenced (live) objects and allowed them to keep in the heap memory whereas the memory of the unreferenced (dead) objects is reclaimed and reused for future object allocation.

Performance Test Life Cycle in DevOps

Stijn Schepers; one of my favourite speaker and blog writer who shares his knowledge especially on Performance Testing and DevOps concept. Today, I am sharing one of his latest article in which he explained the life cycle of performance testing in DevOps world. With a simple and clear diagram, he described the full life cycle.    

LinkedIn Article

What is DevOps?

DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support.