The performance of a web application hugely affects the business in many ways.  Being a very critical aspect of an organization, performance is a key feature of any product. However, there is a lack of implementation when it comes to the testing performance and scalability of the infrastructure in an organization. In fact, there are not so many tools that are used by the organizations. However, there are a number of commercial tools available according to the need of an organization and equally good open source tools to compliment them.

Before considering the tools, performance value and load times are important metrics to consider. You need the right tool to measure the perceived load time of users, as performance holds the key for great user experience. Some of the key performance metrics that define the efficiency of a web application include the following.

  • Less than or equal to 100 milliseconds is considered instantaneous
  • 100-300 ms delay is perceptible
  • 2 Sec is the average time a user expects a site to load
  • After 3 Sec, 40% of visitors will switch away
  • 10 Sec is an ideal time for keeping the users attention

The prime goal of performance testing is to understand the application behaviour under varying load conditions. You need to know that each transaction done on the application is unique in terms of application. For example, a checkout transaction is more complicated and time-consuming as compared to the home page transaction, as it is highly cached. So, in order to ensure a seamless transaction and a great user experience, you must deal with the common flaws and understand both the browser and server aspect of performance. You can find a number of free and open source tools for server-side, client-side, and performance.

Server-side performance tools

  • io
  • Bees with Machine Guns
  • Multi-Mechanize
  • Siege
  • Apache Bench
  • Httperf
  • JMeter

Client-side performance tools

  • Google PageSpeed Insights

Real-world performance tools

  • Google ngx_pagespeed
  • Google mod_pagespeed
  • org

With a wide range of open source performance testing tools available in the market, it is not always required to build and manage your own performance testing tool and infrastructure. Commercial tools allow you to easily build and execute performance tests at some price. All these tools taken together helps perform load testing on the server side, optimize performance testing on the client side.