In the fastest growing technical world applications have become the soul of almost any business. You don’t have much time to impress your users rather than you have just one second or less to impress your user. Therefore load testing becomes essential to ensure the quality and reliability of the application. Load testing tools are vital in ensuring application performance in real, live environments.

If you have an online food ordering site then you must be getting ready for the unexpected traffic on your site. Many customers will be ordering pizza, hot dogs, snacks or desserts through your website. On a heavy user load if your website crashes then your customers will move on to your competitors, and you will lose your sales. As well as your brand reputation will be degraded. Therefore, to avoid this scenario your application of website requires quality load testing tool which ensures the reliability and performance of the application or website. Let’s go through some tips related to load testing for your application or website.

What do you really need to measure?

There is no general approach for running a load test on your application. You should determine what output you are expecting from your load test. you will need to run different types of tests based on what you expect from your application. If your application has clients around the world then you need to perform load test from a different location to test the latency issues. You should target the specific countries or region for the load test.

Decide on a number of virtual users

Before starting load test for your application or website, you will need to approximate how many concurrent users may visit your site. You should also need to know how many virtual users you want to simulate? Most of the testers just take a guess without asking your marketing people, and your application architecture. Testers want to ask engineers how many concurrent users handled by your application. You will need to schedule your tests for a time when actual users can application. We recommend you test at a traffic downtime, like Sunday at 1:00 AM, so you don’t affect real user business.

Run load test from the production environment

By running your load test on your live production site gives you the accurate load test result. It is valuable to test your application in a staging environment, but for a number of reasons, this can leave some holes in your testing. Because staging environment is not the exact copy of your production environment. You can use open source testing tool or freeware testing tools available in the market. By running your load test in the production environment you are creating the exact scenarios your customers are going through. Hence you can find out the real bottlenecks and errors of your application or site.

Decide which metrics you want to measure?

A load testing is useful when is done properly. You should try to allocate enough time for each stage of testing. For making your app reliable you need to plan your testing scenarios and getting prerequisites. You need to know the breaking point of the application and other metrics.

 Analyze load tests results

Take your time and try to understand the results of your various tests, based on a number of concurrent users, a delay between clients start hitting the application, duration, location etc. You should need to inspect the performance metrics like latency, delay, throughput per second, errors, hits per second, CPU, memory and IO usage. All results need to be looked at carefully to find the performance bottlenecks, weakness, and errors in your application.

Consider free and paid load testing tools

There are a lot of load testing tools are available but It depends on you which metrics you want to measure. Do not use price to decide which options to evaluate. You need to be close to your actual user experience while running a load test. If you are unable to achieve this using a free or an open source load testing tool, then maybe a paid solution will solve your need.

Bring your application into failure.

While running load test different user scenarios and the expected number of users must be known. We recommend you to take your application to the upper limit and purposely make it crash. This lets you identify system bottlenecks and errors. By running this you find out the system limits. Hence you will know how to act and recover if the unexpected does happen or you receive unexpected traffic on your system. You can do this by increasing your user load through the load testing tools and analyze the hits per seconds and throughput of the system.

In conclusion, We recommend you to take load testing seriously if you want to make your system more robust and reliable. If you want to get details about the famous load testing tools then click here.