Performance Testing
In white box testing testers, developers, system administrators and DBAs work together in order to instrument the application code and the database queries (via specialized profilers for example), and the hardware/operating system of the server(s) running the application and the database (via monitoring tools such as vmstat, iostat, top or Windows PerfMon). All these activities belong to performance testing.
The performance testing tutorials are designed to teach you the basics of Rational® Performance Tester. To access the tutorials, open the Tutorials Gallery from the Help menu or the Welcome page
Performance Testing : There are lot of Definitions available but the one mentioned in IEEE Glossary is as follows:
“Testing conducted to evaluate the compliance of a system or component with specified performance requirements. Often this is performed using an automated test tool to simulate large number of users. Also known as "Load Testing".
Or
“The testing performed to determine the degree to which a system or component accomplishes its designated functions within given constraints regarding processing time and throughput rate.”
The purpose of the test is to measure characteristics, such as response times, throughput or the mean time between failures (for reliability testing)
Performance testing tool:
A tool to support performance testing and that usually has two main facilities: load generation and test transaction measurement. Load generation can simulate either multiple users or high volumes of input data. During execution, response time measurements are taken from selected transactions and these are logged. Performance testing tools normally provide reports based on test logs and graphs of load against response times.
Features or characteristics of performance-testing tools include support for:
• generating a load on the system to be tested;
• measuring the timing of specific transactions as the load on the system varies;
• measuring average response times;
• producing graphs or charts of responses over time
The following types of tests are included in Performance Testing:
- Benchmark testing: Compares the performance of new or unknown target-of-test to a known reference standard, such as existing software or measurements.
- Contention test: Verifies the target-of-test can acceptably handle multiple actor demands on the same resource (data records, memory, and so forth).
- Performance profiling: Verifies the acceptability of the target-of-test's performance behavior using varying configurations while the operational conditions remain constant.
- Load testing: Verifies the acceptability of the target-of-test's performance behavior under varying operational conditions (such as number of users, number of transactions, and so on) while the configuration remains constant.
- Stress testing: Verifies the acceptability of the target-of-test's performance behavior when abnormal or extreme conditions are encountered, such as diminished resources or an extremely high number of users.
