There are several reasons that you should consider performance testing your application. Some of those reasons are technical, but perhaps the most important is ensuring your web application, website, and server are all acting as expected under increased load.

Regular performance tests will help ensure your website performs at its highest level, resulting in better uptime, less maintenance, and greater user interactivity while on site.

This investment, while taking considerable time to build, can have real, long-term benefits for your business, including great user experiences that directly results in return customers.

Basic benefits of undergoing performance testing include:

• Increased customer satisfaction;
• Better overall customer experiences;
• Higher quality application;
• Reduced risk of system downtime;
• Implementing performance patches before taking your product live;
• Eliminating scalability issues;
• Benchmarking tools for performance engineering teams.

As mentioned, many companies leverage performance testing as a risk mitigation mechanism. There's nothing worse than having your web property crash under load while launching a new product, or promoting your website.

Below is a list of the most common types of performance tests associated with risk mitigation, the purpose they serve, and the types of problems they hope to identify:

Endurance Tests:

• Verify that the application can perform at a high level over a long time period;
• Verify, and attend to, any memory leaks related to past issues;

• Addresses all outstanding issues, and eliminate any new issues that appear as a result of heavy load for an extended period of time.

Component Level Tests :

• Confirms that individual components of an application are fine tuned, and adjusted for peak performance;
• Certifies that component integrations will not cause an issue with the system.

Stress Tests:

• Verify if an application can perform under peak conditions;
• Identify how an application responds under these peak conditions.

Capacity Tests:

• Checks intended performance goals and compares them against actual results during peak load times;
• Validates whether business requirements are met by the application.

Comparison Tests:

• Checks for performance boosts to new application versions and compares them to past versions;
• Compares web properties to the competition.

Have a question or comment? Add your thoughts to the Comments below. Click here to go to the next page .