Performance Testing

What is meant by 'Implement test design'?

Create the performance tests according to your test design.

What is meant by 'Identify the performance acceptance criteria'?

Goals and constraints for throughput, response times, and resource allocation.

What is memory pages/second metric?

Number of pages written to or read from the disk in order to resolve hard page faults.

What is amount of connection pooling metric?

Number of user requests that are met by pooled connections.

What are the steps to performance testing process?

1. Identify your testing environment. 2. Identify the performance acceptance criteria. 3. Plan and design performance tests. 4. Configuring the test environment. 5. Implement test design. 6. Run the tests. 7. Analyze, tune, and retest.

What is bottlenecking?

Obstructions in a system which degrade overall system performance.

What is the purpose of 'Identify the performance acceptance criteria'?

Often the project specifications will not include a wide enough variety of performance benchmarks.

What is connection pooling?

A cache of database connections maintained so that the connections can be reused when future requests to the database are required.

What is LoadNinja?

A cloud-based load testing and performance testing platform for web applications. It helps developers, QA teams, and performance engineers check if their web servers sustain a massive load and if the servers are robust and scalable.

What is JMeter?

A software that can perform load test, performance-oriented business (functional) test, regression test, etc., on different protocols or technologies.

What is performance testing?

A type of software testing to ensure software applications will perform well under their expected workload.

What is processor usage metric?

An amount of time the processor spends executing non-idle threads.

What is volume testing?

Testing large number of data being populated in a database and the overall software system's behavior is monitored.

What is rollback segment metric?

Amount of data that can rollback at any point in time.

What is memory use metric?

Amount of physical memory available to processes on a computer.

What is disk time metric?

Amount of time disk is busy executing a read or write request.

What is committed memory metric?

Amount of virtual memory used.

What is scalability testing?

Testing to see the application's ability to scale up to support an increase in user load.

What is CPU interrupts per second metric?

Average number of hardware interrupts a processor is receiving and processing each second.

What is meant by 'Analyze, tune and retest'?

Consolidate, analyze and share test results. Then fine tune and test again to see if there is an improvement or decrease in performance.

What are some common performance bottlenecks?

CPU, memory, and network utilization, operating system limitations, disk usage.

What is load testing?

Checks the application's ability to perform under anticipated user loads.

How does bottlenecking occur?

Coding errors and hardware issues.

What is meant by 'Run the tests'?

Execute and monitor the tests.

What is spike testing?

Tests the software's reaction to sudden large spikes in the load generated by users.

What is meant by 'Plan & design performance tests'?

Determine how usage is likely to vary amongst end users and identify key scenarios to test for all possible use cases.

How is bottlenecking fixed?

Fixing the section of code that is causing the slowdown or add additional hardware.

What is the purpose of 'Identify your testing environment.'?

Helps identify possible challenges that testers may encounter during the performance testing procedures.

What is speed?

How quickly the application responds.

What is stability?

How stable the application is under varying loads.

What is endurance testing?

Makes sure the software can handle the expected load over a long period of time.

What is stress testing?

Involves testing an application under extreme workloads to see how it handles high traffic or data processing.

What is network output queue length metric?

Length of the output packet queue in packets. Anything more than two means a delay and bottlenecking needs to be stopped.

What are the types of performance testing?

Load testing, stress testing, endurance testing, spike testing, volume testing, scalability testing.

What are some performance tests tools?

LoadNinja, NeoLoad, HP LoadRunner, Jmeter

What is database locks?

Locking of tables.

What are some common performance problems?

Long load times, poor response times, poor scalability, bottlenecking.

What is top waits metric?

Monitored to determine what wait times can be cut down when dealing with how fast data is retrieved from memory.

What are private bytes metric?

Number of bytes a process has allocated that can't be shared amongst other processes. These are used to measure memory leaks and usage.

What is meant by 'Configuring the test environment'?

Prepare the testing environment before execution. Also, arrange tools and other resources.

What is throughput metric?

Rate a computer or network receives requests per second.

What is network bytes total per second metric?

Rate which bytes are sent and received on the interface including framing characters.

What is garbage collection?

Returning unused memory back to the system.

What is bandwidth metric?

Shows the bits per second used by a network interface.

What is performance testing checking?

Speed, Scalability, Stability.

What is disk queue length metric?

The average number of read and write requests queued for the selected disk during a sample interval.

What is the difference between performance testing and performance engineering?

The former is concerned with testing and reporting on the current performance of the application, while the latter is the process of testing and tuning the application until it is at the required performance.

What is maximum active sessions metric?

The maximum number of sessions that can be active at once.

What is scalability?

The maximum user load the software application can handle.

What is load time?

The normal initial time it takes an application to start.

What is the hit ratio metric?

The number of SQL statements that are handled by cached data instead of expensive I/O operations.

What is the hits per second metric?

The number of hits on a web server during each second of a load test.

What is thread counts metric?

The number of threads that are running and currently active.

What is page faults/second metric?

The overall rate in which fault pages are processed by the processor. Occurs when a process requires code from outside its working set.

What is response time metric?

Time from when a user enters a request until the first character of the response is received.

What is the purpose of volume testing?

To check software application's performance under varying database volumes.

Why do performance testing?

To determine whether software meets speed, scalability and stability requirements under expected workloads.

What is purpose of load testing?

To identify performane bottlenecks before the software application goes lives.

What is the purpose of stress testing?

To identify the breaking point of an application.

What is the purpose of 'Plan & design performance tests'?

To simulate a variety of end users, plan performance test data and outline what metrics will be gathered.

What is meant by 'Identify your testing environment.'?

Understand details of the hardware, software and network configurations used during testing before you begin the testing process.

What are hard page faults?

When code not from the current working set is called up from elsewhere and retrieved from a disk.