The success of any business depends upon the performance of the application. There are various organizations that think performance testing as crucial in meeting their business targets. However, many companies still do not test the performance and scalability of the infrastructure on a regular basis. With the advancement in technology and development of advanced applications, things have become more complex. Today, one has to understand the importance of great user experience while testing modern application performance.
There are a few performance metrics that need to be considered for performance testing. For example, what should be an optimal access time for the website to be considered fast?
- Under 100ms is considered instantaneous
- 100ms-300ms is considered perceptible
- 1 s is considered uninterrupted by users
- Average expected time for a site to load is considered to be 2 s
- Almost 40% will close the site after 3 s
It is equally important to understand the baseline performance of your application. In addition, the performance of each transaction is unique. For example, in an e-commerce application the checkout page is complex, whereas the homepage is highly cached. So, in order to ensure a hassle free experience, you must test the common errors and analyze the performance in the browser and on the server.
Server Side Performance
There are various tools that can be used to check the requests per second for an end point. Tools like Apache Bench and Siege are idle for quick load tests of a single end point. However, there are various other tools providing a load testing framework. Some one of the tools that can test complex transactions with a high-level of concurrency and ease are mentioned below.
- Locust
- Bees
- MultiMechanize
- Siege
- Apache Bench
- HttpPerf
- JMeter
Client Side Performance
Time spent by modern applications is more on browser than on server. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights helps in understanding client side performance. It first analyzes the page and then generates suggestions to make it quicker.
