Performance Testing is done to determine the software characteristics like response time, throughput or MIPS (Millions of instructions per second) at which the system/software operates.
Performance Testing is done by generating some activity on the system/software, this is done by the performance test tools available. The tools are used to create different user profiles and inject different kind of activities on server which replicates the end-user environments.
The purpose of doing performance testing is to ensure that the software meets the specified performance criteria, and figure out which part of the software is causing the software performance go down.
Performance Testing Tools should have the following characteristics:
Generate load on the system which is tested
Measure the server response time
Measure the throughput
Performance Testing Tools
1. IBM Rational Performance Tester
Its a performance testing tool from IBM, it supports load testing for applications such as HTTP, SAP, Siebel etc. It is supported on Windows and Linux.
2. Loadrunner
Loadrunner is HP’s (formerly Mercury’s) load/stress testing tool for web and other applications, it supports a wide variety of application environments, platforms, and databases. Large suite of network/app/server monitors to enable performance measurement of each tier/server/component and tracing of bottlenecks.
3. Apache jmeter
Jmeter is Java desktop application from the Apache Software Foundation designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance. This was originally designed for testing Web Applications but has expanded to other test functions; may be used to test performance both on static and dynamic resources (files, Servlets, Perl scripts, Java Objects, Data Bases and Queries, FTP Servers and more). It can also be used to simulate a heavy load on a server, network or object to test its strength or to analyze overall performance under different load types; can make a graphical analysis of performance or test server/script/object behavior under heavy concurrent load.
4. DBUnit
Open source JUnit extension (also usable with Ant) targeted for database-driven projects that, among other things, puts a database into a known state between test runs. Enables avoidance of problems that can occur when one test case corrupts the database and causes subsequent tests to fail or exacerbate the damage. Has the ability to export and import database data to and from XML datasets. Can work with very large datasets when used in streaming mode, and can help verify that database data matches expected sets of values.
