“Load Testing”, the term itself clears a little bit of understanding of what Load Testing refers to. It refers to the testing of Load that is applied to the application or the product to verify if our application/product is capable of bearing a load on our application servers.

Now, we will look into answering the questions like What, Why, and How it is one of the most important parts of Testing to perform Load Testing especially for giant projects that have lacks/million number of users using its services.

It falls under the category of Non-functional testing. It identifies how the system behaves during normal and high loads and determines if a system, software, or computing device can manage heavy load due to the high demand of end-users. This testing is typically applied when a software development project comes nears completion.

It is always considered as the best practice to perform Load Testing for a tester for any of the mobile or web application he is working on it.

Best Practices for Load Testing:

1. Identify the objectives of the business/project. A strong understanding of future goals for scope will draw clear guidelines to inform the process.

2. Determine key application and web performance measures. Some of the criteria involve response times, throughput, resource utilisation, maximum user load and business performance practises.

3. Choose a suitable tool. Choose a tool that matches your needs. For example, the Jmeter tool is preferred to be a strong and highly featured Load Testing tool as it can load test both dynamic and static resources by creating concurrent users to create a real-life testing environment to recognize the bottlenecks in any web or mobile application.

4. Create a test case. In writing a test case, ensure that both positive and negative scenarios are taken into consideration. Test cases should be accurate and capable of complying with the requirements.

5. Understand your environment. Consider different types of deployments you might want to test. Create configurations similar to typical production. Test different system capacities like security, hardware, software, and networks.

6. Run tests. During these tests, the system will ultimately fail. One key goal is determining what factors results in failure, and highlighting what fails first.

7. Always keep end-users in mind. The satisfaction of customers and site visitors is crucial to the achievement of business metrics. This plays into their willingness to revisit a site or re-access an application.

Consequently, the tester should be prepared the test report and share it to the respective developer to report all bugs found in testing.

Why is Load Testing important?

Well, the answer is quite simple- to find performance issues before we go live. Load Testing helps us:

1. It determines our application’s capabilities by measuring its response time, throughput, CPU utilization, latency, etc. during average and heavy user load. This will eventually help in determining the infrastructure needs as the system scales upward on the IT level.

2. It allows us to find strange behaviour or surprises when we subject an application to an insane amount of load (stress testing). Strange behaviours include request timeouts, IO Exceptions, memory leaks, or any security issues.

3. It helps us understand if any new code path or database connection introduced lead to any performance issues.

4. It helps the testers to perform API testing, Database testing to determine whether our API are developed and integrated well by analyzing their response time, latency, etc. On the other hand, it helps to ensure our data entries in the database are properly done without any errors/redundancy of data.

Note: In a nutshell, we went through the basics of Load Testing usage and importance. Also, a question arises many of the times, that we get confused in these three terms Load, Stress, and Performance testing.

The main key difference between them is, Performance testing is used to determine the speed of the device or network. Load testing is the actual end-user load your software can handle. If you want to determine the stability and power of your software, then you should go for stress testing. Performance testing is one category and the other two i.e. load and stress testing is the subcategory of performance testing. They are there to ensure the seamless functioning of your application in complicated conditions.