Stress & Performance Testing

Ensuring the performance of your network and applications is critical to the success of any business or IT project. Cutting edge functionality, timely delivery to the right market or other success factors will all be undermined if the performance of the solution fails to meet levels that are acceptable.

In simple terms, performance testing should be carried out to ensure that your website or application can do what you expect, under a given workload. It is used to discover bottlenecks and establish a baseline for future performance enhancements and testing. Performance testing also helps to evaluate other characteristics such as Scalability and Reliability and as a way to test Disaster Recovery scenarios.

While we talk in terms of Performance Testing there are a number of testing practices used to deliver it. We provide the full scope of performance testing practices primarily covering:

• Load Testing: Where the application and network are put under a load that is within the expected usage profile. This helps identify performance bottle-necks and allow them to be resolved.
• Stress Testing: Taking load beyond expected operational limits to see if things fail gracefully. A good informer for risks such as Denial of Service attacks, Load Balancing and Recovery.
• Soak Testing: Applying load over a given period to ensure the system behaves during lengthy up-time. Looking for memory leaks, garbage collection.

We also undertake other forms of performance testing activities such as Spike, Configuration and Isolation Testing.

Feel free to ask us about these and how they might apply to your project.