What is a Load Test?
A load test is a kind of non-functional test that evaluates how well a system or application performs when it is being used at its maximum capacity. This test confirms the software system’s resource utilization, stability, and dependability under heavy stress.
What is Peak Load?
Depending on the production data selection criteria, peak load is the highest load (in terms of users or volume) determined throughout a day, a month, or a year. Refer to the graph below to understand the peak load.
This graph displays the daily average of consumers that were active in June. 927 customers were actively using the service as of June 30. The peak load is thus 927.
For a new application: Because a new application lacks production data, the peak demand must be forecast. The anticipated peak application traffic is confirmed by the customer or project business analyst (BA). The workload model may be prepared for the load test using the anticipated peak load by a performance tester.
Goal of a Load Test:
- The goal of a load test is to determine if an application can withstand a peak load.
- Keep an eye on the application’s response time behaviors.
- To determine whether the resources’ (CPU, Memory, and Disc) performance does not exceed the specified limit
- to determine whether any bottlenecks exist
Regression-based load testing is also used to find performance problems
brought on by weekly, biweekly, or monthly code releases.
Approach:
There are many distinct sets of NFRs in the NFR document for the load test. These NFRs are connected to information like the number of peak users, response time, transactions per second, etc. Using these NFRs, a performance tester creates the workload model and runs the test. The load test should ideally last one hour An example user graph for a load test is:
The given graph has a steady state of one hour, a ramp-up time of ten minutes, and a ramp-down duration of ten minutes. Consequently, the exam will last an hour and 20 minutes. After the test is over, a performance tester compares the results to the established load test NFRs.
