Load testing is a type of performance testing. It is a procedure which determines the performance of a system with different number of users. The load testing identifies
- The maximum functioning capacity of an application with different users
- Specifies whether the present infrastructure is sufficient to run the application
- Determines the sustainability for different user loads
- Number of concurrent users and scalability
Load testing is type of non functional testing. It is mainly used for web-based applications.
Why load testing is necessary?
- Load testing provides confidence in the system performance and reliability
- It also helps to identify the bottlenecks under heavy stress conditions
- It gives protection against poor performance with different number of users
Some popular websites have experienced serious downtimes when there is heavy traffic. Some examples are:
- an airline websites was not able to handle thousand users during festive offers and
- encyclopaedia Britannica gave free access to their online database as a promotional offer.
Load testing is a process of putting a load(users) on the system and recording its response.
The strategies of load testing are:
Manual load testing:
This is one of the processes to execute load testing but does not produce any repeatable results, does not provide measurable levels of stress and do not have any coordination.
In house developed load testing tools:
The organisation which understands the importance of load testing can build their own testing tools.
Open source load testing tools:
There are many open source testing tools available in the internet which are free of cost.
Enterprise class load testing tools:
These support large number of protocols. They can support large number of users.
Few facts of load testing are
- Most users click after 8 secs when delay in loading page
- $4.4 billion lost due to poor performance of the application
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