5 Types of Load Testing You Must Know
Testing is an essential part of any product. With proper testing, one can eliminate all defects and ensure their product meets all the given requirements. And when a product is bug-free and reliable, the user conversation rate goes much higher, allowing the company to push its limits and rise higher.
There are many types of testing, and each type has its purpose. Here, we will talk about load testing, a kind of non-functional testing that falls under performance testing. Load testing can be done manually or with the help of testing tools like Jmeter. Jmeter load testing can be done very quickly.
Types of Load Testing #
There are five main types of load testing. Now let’s understand each type in detail:
Stress Testing #
When your application faces an extremely heavy load, it should not crash. This is where stress testing comes into the picture. Stress testing is used to measure the stability and reliability of an application. To check your application’s capacity and robustness, you need to perform stress testing by creating a high usage load scenario.
The objective of stress testing is to break the system by putting in extra load and marking that reading to use in the future. Based on that reading, a team can gain a better understanding of the limitations of the system. For example, knowing the user limit of your e-commerce website tells you whether you are ready for your next sale event.
Stress testing ensures that your software and hardware are in proper sync, there is no hardware or data issue, you can carry out recoverability checks based on any failure, and your security isn’t compromised in the case of a failure. Here’s an overview of stress testing:
Spike Testing #
Many times we experience sudden extreme load on a system. The goal of spike testing is to check overall system behavior when a system receives heavy traffic fluctuations. Spike refers to traffic variations: it can be increasing or decreasing. The main part that is tested is the recovery time. Recovery time is a system’s processing time between two active spikes.
To perform spike testing, first, you need to determine the system’s max user load capacity. Accordingly, you then need to prepare and configure the testing environment. Then, using a testing tool, apply the determined user load on the system. Analyze the system performance at that time. If everything works as expected, start increasing the load. After a while, return the load to normal. Now, based on each variation, you can analyze the result.
While spike testing is great for figuring out the strength of your system, it has two major disadvantages. First is that it has a high environment cost, and second is that it needs more resources and time.
Soak Testing #
To ensure good performance, a system needs to be tested under a huge load over a continuous availability period. In soak testing, the tester checks the sustainability of a system. It is system-level testing in which the expected behavior is for the system to stand up against a high-level load. The end goal of soak testing is to make the system more reliable and stable.
Soak testing generally identify issues related to the system, such as memory leaks, connection failures, database connectivity issues, and late response times. Soak testing improves a system’s resistance and performance. Without automating this soak testing, predicting how long a system can run under extreme load becomes very difficult and time-consuming.
Scalability Testing #
Scalability means how your system scales up or down with changes in the number of requests. The system should scale up with more requests and vice versa, both on the client and server sides. Moreover, the UI should be consistent across all these changes.
In scalability testing, the tester checks the session, request and response time, screen transition, memory, and database usage. Load balance, an OS, a processor, and memory are perquisites for setting up the scalability testing environment.
Volume Testing #
Volume testing is a type of load testing. It is also known as flood testing. Volume testing is used to measure huge volumes of data in a database. Generally, if your application is used more in pick time, database CRUD operations are coming into the picture. If your database sustains an appropriate load, then overall application performance isn’t impacted. It’s good to identify defects related to the database beforehand.
Volume testing is very useful for multiple reasons. It gives you your application’s database failure threshold in advance, allows you to estimate scalability plans in advance, and enables you to measure database performance. However, as we deal with large data, it’s a little challenging to populate dummy data and insert it into the database.
Conclusion #
As you know, load testing measures your system performance under particular conditions. Each time you face some unknown condition, you face the risk of something bad occurring. If you fail to test those conditions beforehand, you risk encountering a problem you can’t fix in time.
Understanding the data matrix is important to pass each type of load testing. If you test each type of load testing before a product release, you can reduce the chances of a system failure.