Class 12th Board results were out and I ran to my PC to check the result. The anxiety level was rising every moment as it was taking time for the result page to open. Why is this page taking so long to open..?? Have I scored less…or perhaps I have failed in Chemistry..?? Oh god…!!! What is going to happen… :(?? Finally after 7 minutes and a few seconds, I rested in peace when the internet page opened and highlighted PASS on the monitor. I just kicked my PC for taking the life out of me in those 7 minutes.

It’s just been a few days that I have stopped cursing my poor machine for those worst 7 minutes of my life when I came across a term called as “Performance Testing”. I felt like sharing the definition of this term with you people and got up to writing this starting blog.Performance testing is an emerging science in the field of Software testing. When we talk about effective development of an application its makes our life easy, we cannot neglect its high performance as one of the major factors contributing to its quality. Performance testing is done to test a specific behavior of the application. But is there any specific criterion to define performance?

To define the concepts of performance of any system software or any general application (web/system), we can define a phrase “meeting of requirements with the timeliness” of the application. A well running application will always meet its requirements under the benchmark indicators. We map these benchmarks to the actual performance counters, which help us to judge, how the application is performing under the current environment.

Though Performance testing is done in conjunction with stress testing, but performance testing is not only stress testing. It covers the other aspects such as load testing and endurance testing along with the stress testing.These performance counters can broadly be categorized into two major dimensions, namely, Responsiveness and Scalability.

Throughput of the system is the number of events which an application can process within some interval of time. More the throughput better is the performance of the application.

Response time of an application is the time required to process any instruction and return back the result. It is the waiting time, the measure of which is directly proportional to the number of concurrent users working on the application.

Scalability of an application can be defined by its ability to meet the throughput and the response time objectives, even as the load on the application continue to increase with the increasing functionaries. Better performance is achieved by high scalability of the application.

There are a number of tools, both commercial and open-source, to facilitate performance testing of any application. Commercial tools like Load Runner (LR) and Rational Performance Tester (RPT) are well equipped to support a number of different protocols for performance testing. Open-source tools such as OpenSTA, JMeter, Grinder, Webload etc. have made it easy for the small scale IT industries to test the performance of their applications without spending a substantial sum on gaining the licenses of their commercial counterparts.

Well friends, the heavy rush on the Results website was the actual reason for the delay in the result that night and not my poor PC. I believe such websites should go for the performance testing of their applications before giving nightmares to the innocent children…

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