What is Load Testing? Processes, Types, Best Practices, Tools, and More
Any software development project will almost certainly have through several tests by the time it is finished, especially in an Agile testing environment where testing and development occur simultaneously. But, no matter how many tests you've conducted, there's really only one way to tell if your software can handle the actual demands your army of end-users will be throwing on it once it's nearly finished. It's known as load testing.
1. What is Load Testing?
Load Testing is a type of performance testing in which any software, application, or website is subjected to a realistic load. Your application could fail badly in real-world scenarios if you don't have it. Load Testing establishes if a system, piece of software, or computing equipment can manage high loads given a high demand from end-users by examining how it responds under normal and high loads.
It's a type of non-functional software testing in which the performance of a software application is evaluated under a certain load. When a big number of individuals use a software product at the same time, it controls how it operates.
The following conditions are frequently discovered during load testing:
2. Load Testing Architecture
We can see how different users interact with the application in the diagram above. Each user sends a request over the internet, which is then routed through a firewall.
Following the firewall, we have a load balancer that distributes the load to any of the web servers, then to the application server, and last to the database server, where it retrieves the required information based on the user request.
Load Testing can be performed manually or with the use of a tool. However, manual load testing is not recommended because the application is not tested for a lower load.
Assume we want to test an online shopping application to evaluate how quickly it responds to each user click, i.e. Launch URL, response time, Log in to the application and take notes on things like selecting a product, adding it to your basket, pay for it, and logging out. All of this must be completed for a total of five users.
So, instead of utilizing a tool, we can now physically load the application with five physical users from various workstations to test the application load for five users. In this case, it is preferable to perform a manual load test rather than purchasing a product and configuring an environment for it.
Consider the following scenario, if we need to load test for 1000 users or ten thousand users, we must automate the load test using any of the available solutions based on the technologies used in the application and the project's budget. If we have a large budget, we can use commercial solutions such as LoadRunner, but if we don't, we can use open source tools like JMeter, etc.
This is how the architecture looks while using the Load Testing Tool:
3. Process in Load Testing
The following are the steps involved in load testing:
4. Best Practices for Load Testing
It requires more than the best tool and software to execute effective load testing of your application. When it comes to load testing, the most important thing to know is best practices. Here are several tried and tested practices:
5. Types of Load Testing
Load testing can be accomplished in a variety of methods. A few load testing methodologies are as follows:
6. How to Select Load Testing Tool?
It's critical to choose a tool that can help your team. We understand that performance testing takes time during the release cycle, but it is typically the harbinger of production success. Performance testing allows you to see how your application will perform in production before deploying it, allowing you to identify and resolve issues before going live.
Testing exposes whether your website performs differently under load, whether your code change has unintended consequences, and saves money in the long term by finding issues before they become costly production issues. Keep the following aspects in mind while evaluating a load testing tool:
7. Tools for Load Testing
The following list includes licensed load testing tools; however, practically all licensed tools offer a free trial version, allowing customers to try out the software before selecting which is the best fit for their needs:
8. Benefits of Load Testing
Bottlenecks are discovered before production, scalability is increased, system downtime is decreased, customer satisfaction is improved, and failure costs are lowered. Specifically:
9. Load Testing vs. Stress Testing
Load Testing, the most well-known and widely used sort of performance testing, includes putting a software application or IT system under normal demand to check if it can function as expected. Load Testing is similar to its larger, more severe cousin, stress testing, but it guarantees that a particular function, application, or system can simply manage what it's supposed to handle, whereas stress testing is about stressing things until they break, using unrealistic or unlikely load situations.
Both approaches can be useful in establishing how effectively a given piece of frontend software, like a website, or a backend system, such as the Apache server that hosts that website, can handle the actual loads it will encounter in normal operation.
Stress Testing causes failures on purpose so that you may assess the risk associated with the breaking points and, if necessary, adjust programs to break more gracefully. Stress testing is important for anticipating the unexpected and identifying how far a given system can be pushed, allowing for the exploration of the system's performance boundaries.
However, load testing is the best approach for ensuring that a software application or physical network can withstand the user requests and actions it is likely to experience under normal circumstances.
10. Why Load Testing is Important?
The tester is essentially modelling how the website or application would operate when hundreds, thousands, or even millions of users visit it in real life while testing it under load. Due to a shortage of system resources, the application may operate effectively for one user during functional testing but suffer when numerous users try to access it at the same time during load testing.
As a result, load testing is a superior way to investigate, analyse, and fix errors before they occur in real-time.
Even though you completed load testing as part of the testing process a few months ago, it is recommended that you do it again if the code has been altered numerous times since then. All of the code modifications performed after your load testing may have had an impact on the system's ability to handle the load.
It is a good idea to execute an automated load test as part of the continuous integration cycle to ensure that the end-user is not shocked by the system's performance.
Hiring load testers may be more expensive, but the expense of repairing a website that crashes in real-time is considerably more costly.
Summary
Load Testing is an important aspect of the software testing process since it guarantees that the software performs to the best of its ability. When load testing is done correctly, it produces high-quality software that adheres to industry requirements.
Load Testing is difficult, thus getting aid from specialists or learning to use load testing tools to make API testing easier and more adaptable is the best option.
Blog by:
Gokul P G
Digital Marketing Executive |?JK Lucent
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