What is performance testing?
Performance testing is a non- functional testing to test how your system behaves when multiple tasks carried out at a time or multiple users use the system at a time or to check the response time of your system. It involves quantitative test related to various system aspects. In other words performance testing is a type of testing intended to determine the responsiveness, reliability, and/or scalability of a system under a given workload
Types of performance testing
Performance of any system depends upon various aspects which might include how fast system gives response to action. How system works with different configurations, how the system behaves when increase the load or decrease the load etc. Below are the type of performance testing can be considered-
- Load testing
- Stress testing
- Soak testing
- Spike testing
- Configuration testing
Why we need performance testing?
- To test how the system behaves in various load conditions. (If increased or decreased the workload of the application)
- To test if the system is ready to release for mass usage.
- To test the system or application is stable enough so that it won’t get broken in any scenario.
- To test if the application will run on various system configurations available in the market.
- To test the application’s response time with various internet speeds
- To test the loopholes of application in different load times.
- To improve the overall application performance
Website or free online tools available for performance testing
Object size and download time check – The webpage consist of different objects like HTML, HTML images, CSS, JAVA scripts etc. which affects the speed of the page while loading. To test this online for free visit http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
Site timer check – Bandwidth or user’s internet connection and the pages download time may affect the performance of the application if pages are too large and user has low bandwidth it will take long to get a response which might not keep the user stay on your page for long so monitoring your web pages is must. You can monitor this on http://www.octagate.com/service/SiteTimer/
Check for Up and down time of the website– It is important to check whether your website is working properly or it is down at the moment. Check if it is down for particular regions and working fine for other regions. To test whether your site is up or not use http://currentlydown.com/ and for checking whether site is up or down for particular region use http://internetsupervision.com/scripts/urlcheck/check.aspx
Analyze user stays time on the webpage– It is always preferable to analyze the users stay time on your website if webpage is taking too long to load it is most likely that user will leave your page immediately and stay for long if loads in a blink. To analyze the pattern of users on webpages, click on http://www.1-hit.com/all-in-one/tool.loading-time-checker.htm
Check speed Location wise – Different location has different speed to load your web page. It is a good practice to track which location takes how much time and what all factor affecting the speed. Check your website’s speed at various locations using https://www.dotcom-tools.com/website-speed-test.aspx
Check Page wise report– It is good to analyze page wise view of each webpage of your web site like first view, repeat view which will help to analyze the performance. You can check the page hits and page speed performance. To check page wise performance of your website you can use http://www.webpagetest.org/
Check why your website is slow- There are several factor which may affect your website’s performance like non minimized HTTP requests, Java scripts, CSS,Cookie s size, files or images are not zipped, Position of style sheet and scripts etc. To check all this factor you can use an add on of chrome http://yslow.org/
Factors affecting page speed and there solutions – As discussed above, there are various factors affecting the speed of website. Page speed insight a google product is very helpful to find out which are all factors affecting the performance with priorities to fix. As well as the tool gives the fixes to a particular page and link.
Check for overall performance of the website – GTmetrix is an online tool which will help you to improve your performance as well as it gives competitive analysis with comparison to YSlow! And Page speed insight. It recommends the fixes to optimize your website and improve the performance.
