It’s an era of web 2.0, information on internet is shared to a large group of people world wide. Researchers have found that most of the web user never comes back to a website which takes more than 4 seconds to load. But to do business we need ads and other mechanisms to flow in our websites to stand up in the market. These ads increases the load time and other parameters affecting the overall performance of the applications. We need to find a balance between the intended contents and business content of our website so that we don’t lose a user group.The primary goal of load testing is to define the maximum amount of work a system can handle without significant performance degradation.
Let me share with you some statistics that is self explanatory for why someone would go for load testing
| Delay in downloading the website | Percentage of people discarding the website after the delay |
| 2 to 4 seconds | 2.00% |
| 4 to 6 seconds | 30.00% |
| 6 to 8 seconds | 56.00% |
| 8 to 10 seconds | 72.00% |
There are a lot of parameters which are taken into consideration when one thinks of using an website
=> Response Time
=> Throughput
=> Latency
=> Elapsed Time
But the most important among them is Response Time, We would like to mention the three types of Response Times from a survey :
The basic advice regarding response times has been about the same for thirty years [Miller 1968; Card et al. 1991]:
- 0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously, meaning that no special feedback is necessary except to display the result.
- 1.0 second is about the limit for the user’s flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the delay. Normally, no special feedback is necessary during delays of more than 0.1 but less than 1.0 second, but the user does lose the feeling of operating directly on the data.
- 10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user’s attention focused on the dialogue. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish, so they should be given feedback indicating when the computer expects to be done.
Feedback during the delay is especially important if the response time is likely to be highly variable, since users will then not know what to expect.
Normally, response times should be as fast as possible, but it is also possible for the computer to react so fast that the user cannot keep up with the feedback. For example, a scrolling list may move so fast that the user cannot stop it in time for the desired element to remain within the available window. The fact that computers can be too fast indicates the need for user-interface changes, like animations, to be timed according to a real-time clock rather than being timed as an indirect effect of the computer’s execution speed: Even if a faster model computer is substituted, the user interface should stay usable. To build a fully functional and good to look at GUI are important but Good Response Time for any application is equally important. Everybody wants it fast, so doing a load testing for an application can help us identify the bottlenecks and deadlocks for enhancing its performance by doing appropriate performance tuning.
Its context dependent, although very practical to have a large number of users using your application but who knows how the server would react when it encounters a huge load for the first time when the application in LIVE?
What we can achieve when we go for load testing is purely a context dependent affair, but as a whole we can achieve the following :
What would be the user experience and why they will switch to our application if they have
alternatives which works even better and faster than ours.
How the functionality would work if a large group of users makes same request to the server.
What would be the average response time that our application would provide to the expected user base.
How much resources the application would be using if hit by such loads at both client(Users) end and server end.
What is the best suited browser for your application from performance point of views
These questions are pretty difficult to answer if we don’t create a similar scenarios with the application. So let’s do load testing to find and explore the answers to these questions and lets solve the issues which might come when our application experiences a huge user load.
Written By: – Santosh Srivastava, QA Engineer, Mindfire Solutions
