An Ultimate Guide To Key Metrics Checklist Of Load Testing

One of the most significant problems that can affect the performance and competitiveness of a website is the inability of the website to cope with the excessive traffic burden. In turn, this results in a decrease in the ability to satisfy all of the users’ demands without having to deal with cracks, temporary display errors, or slow response times. Therefore, the amount of workload imposed on a website is a crucial factor in determining its success and profitability.

It is important to ensure a website is capable of handling the expected amount of activity prior to launching it. In order to avoid unexpected problems, load testing allows you to see how your site performs under real-life circumstances and determine where to make changes. During this article, we’ll review the role, importance, and metrics of load testing in software development, as well as how to guarantee its success.

Why Should You Do Load Testing?

There are many types of tests used by developers and test engineers. A unit test verifies that the code returns the correct result, an integration test ensures that the code works together, and a user interface test ensures the visual elements are compatible across multiple platforms and devices. One of the most common performance test types is load testing, which tends to be neglected the most. As long as functional tests pass, the application is ready for launch. Although some pieces of code may function, they may not scale well to hundreds or thousands of users.

Consider a developer who writes code that contains an N+1 query that puts unnecessary strain on the database. Despite the fact that the query will return the correct result and may pass functional tests if it is executed thousands of times, the database may become overloaded, and the application may crash due to the overload.

One of the worst things about these issues is that they may not be noticed until it is too late. For example, an e-commerce website could work perfectly until Black Friday, or a startup’s web application might work perfectly until it gets picked up on Product Hunt. It’s not a good time for something to go wrong! However, you can reduce load testing time through some good load testing services that allow engineers to record tests and replay them instantly without the need for tedious correlation or coding.

How to Reach KPI of Load Testing?

You can achieve the key performance indicators for load testing by following these steps. So, let’s have a closer look at each step.

1) Determine your business objectives

If you want to determine whether your load testing was successful, you must first establish your overall business objectives so that you can determine if it was successful. It is very essential that you take the time to answer a few key questions, one of which is how the testing relates to the overall business objectives. Plus, you should also ask yourself, “How will my application perform under a load test? ”

Furthermore, when establishing your test environment, you will need to consider what aspects of the user experience will be helpful in establishing business metrics and what basic user requirements will be required.

2) Determine if your application’s and web’s KPIs have been met

After establishing your business objective, you need to create some basic KPIs to measure real-time performance against the objectives. For instance, you can include Error Rate, Requests per Second, and Peak Response Time.

3) Familiarize Yourself With load environment

You should always remember that the purpose of load testing is to replicate your production environment. Your test results can be affected significantly by even small changes to your hardware or configuration. In order to avoid bottlenecks in your test environment, be aware of the hardware limits of your test environment.

Also Read: Why Load Testing Is Important For Your Website?

4) Focus on your end-users

If you don’t have regular customers or visitors, you will not be able to generate any revenue, so make sure you set up your load testing with the end-user experience in mind. Analyze the results of each load test once it has been completed. Moreover, you should ensure that your benchmarks have been met by assessing performance against previously identified KPIs and business objectives. As a primary goal of load testing, your product, service, and brand engagement should keep your customers returning to your site.

5) Execute the load test incrementally

There needs to be a limit to how much testing should take place at the beginning. Initially, start with a small number of distributed users and then gradually increase it.

Taking this approach will allow you to identify bottlenecks and crash points in your system more readily. After running the first test, stop and complete analytics for each cycle. If any bottlenecks exist, ensure they are fixed before moving on to the next testing scenario.

Key Metrics Checklist Of Load Test

To achieve the best results from load testing, it is crucial to identify and estimate the key metrics. It is also vital that you define the milestones in order to achieve performance excellence. Following that, the parameters that fall under the set milestones need to be measured in order to estimate the output and compare it to the expected result. In this context, let’s take a look at the essential key metrics checklist for load testing.

1. Average response time

When you measure the start and end of each request, you can get data relevant to the return trip from the browser and the time elapsed before the target web application delivered the requested content. Based on the start of the request and the response to that request, the average response time gives you information as to how long it takes to get the response from your browser.

An average answer time can be determined by calculating the mean of most requests/responses. Generally, the value obtained is a measure of the speed of the web application being tested, as well as of how well the internet site is performing from the perspective of the user.

2. Requests per second

RPS is a measurement that represents the number of requests sent to the target server. It includes Flash and multimedia files, Web Page stylesheets, images, JavaScript libraries, XML documents, and HTML pages.

3. User transactions

User transactions are sequences of actions that the user performs by interacting with the interface provided by the software. It is possible to evaluate the load performance of a software application by comparing the expected time with the transaction time (number of transactions per second).

4. Virtual users per unit of time

This metric is used to evaluate whether the software performs according to the expected performance requirements in a given set of conditions. As a result, the QA team is able to estimate the average load and the behavior of the software under a variety of load conditions.

Also Read: Load Testing vs. Performance Testing vs. Stress Testing

5. Peak response time

As with Average Response Time, Peak Response Time measures the duration of request/response cycles. In this case, the peak represents the longest interval in the cycle. An anomaly within the web application can lead to a peak response time that indicates which resource is potentially problematic.

6. Error rates

Under heavy load, an application may display some expected errors during request processing. An error rate is calculated by comparing the number of problems requested with the total number of requests. The most common cause of these errors is when the web application cannot handle any more requests. In measuring the efficiency of an application, the error rate is crucial since it measures the application’s “performance failure.”

7. Wait time

It is also known as average latency in the industry. Basically, it tells you how much time has passed from the moment a request is sent to the server until the first byte has been received from that server. Both timeframes are considered different – don’t confuse them.

8. Average load time

According to a study, over 40% of users will quit a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. It is an evaluation of the average time taken to complete the request during performance testing. For a high-quality product, this parameter is essential.

9. Concurrent users

An enumeration of concurrent users is typically used throughout a test to find out how much load is being applied. In this metric, we measure the number of virtual users who are active at any given time. However, it cannot be compared to RPS because a user can create huge numbers of requests, whereas virtual users cannot.

Also Read: How To Make Load Tests More Realistic – 6 Simple Strategies

10. Transactions passed/failed

In this metric, the percentage of passed or failed requests is expressed against the total number of tests conducted. A product’s performance can be measured by this metric, which is just as important for users as the loading time for the website.

11. Throughput

In computing, throughput is measured in kilobytes per second. In addition to measuring bandwidth usage, it also measures the amount of data that flows between servers during the test.

12. CPU utilization

Based on this metric, you can determine how long it takes the central processing unit to process a request at a given point in time.

13. Memory utilization

Memory utilization also indicates how many resources are required to process a request, but in terms of physical memory on a specific device that a QA engineer uses for testing (or a user has this software installed on).

Also Read: Jmeter Vs LoadRunner: Which One Is Better for Performance Testing?

14. Total user sessions

The intensity of traffic over a specific period of time is shown by this metric. There are a wide range of factors that affect user sessions, such as the number of sessions per day or per week, depending on what time frame a product owner focuses on. Among the total data collected for user sessions, there can be the number of page views and the number of bytes transferred.

15. Latency

It’s a measure of how long it takes between sending the request and receiving the first response. During data transmission from client to server, latency assists us in measuring and understanding the network delay.

16. Connect Time

It measures the time between the user’s connection and the server’s response, including SSL handshakes. In addition to being part of the response time KPI, it is crucial for isolating SSL performance bottlenecks.

How to Track Testing Metrics Correctly?

Tracking metrics for the sake of tracking is not the best idea – it’s more like a waste of time. A metric isn’t a pleasant number to write down in a report because the numbers don’t make any sense. As with every aspect of the quality assurance process, they should address specific questions and test hypotheses that relate to business objectives. This is the only case in which metrics lead to positive changes.

There are numerous principles to keep in mind if you want to use metrics for benefit.

• Develop a list of performance requirements based on a client’s business objectives.
• Each feature should be assigned a specific success metric – either a single parameter or a narrow range of parameters.
• Metrics should be related to the value delivered to a software user – high speed, software stability, all features working, etc.
• Track metrics over time by running multiple performance tests. To determine average indicators and obtain consistent findings, you need to analyze the dynamics.
• Ensure that each software unit is tested separately. Make sure databases, services, etc., are in good shape before you merge them into one application. Prior to your application release, don’t wait until the end of the process.

When focusing on a specific feature or area, metrics can provide valuable insights and ideas for enhancing vulnerabilities. You don’t need to measure everything you can just because you have the time or desire to.

Final Thoughts

It is equally important to perform load tests in the Agile development process as to perform functional tests. It is possible to avoid costly downtime during peak usage by incorporating load tests into continuous integration processes. Additionally, load testing services simplify the process from beginning to end. Hence, try to use some good services from the beginning in order to get the best results.