Provide other parameters to consider for performance testing

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Permalink Reply by Bill Smith on May 7, 2011 at 1:39am

Of course you need to consider the initial conditions, e.g. server configuration, network configuration, and amount of data already in the database.

 

"Number of users to support system" can mean different things, e.g.

• how many users you can support with a certain amount of disk space
• how many users your administrative console can display with reasoanble performance
• how many users can be logged in simultaneously
• how many connections (or requests) the server can handle per unit time

Most applications perform multiple operations.  You have to decide which operations (or mixtures of operations) you want to measure.  Different operations will have different performance characteristics. Moreover, since operations may share the same database, operations of different times may interfere with each other.

As you measure response time, you may also want to measure how the server is behaving, e.g. cpu utilization, memory consumption, network utilization, disk space consumption, disk I/O rates.  Your ability to measure these in isolation will depend on whether other applications are running on the machine, whether the machine is physical or virtual, etc.

 

I hope that helps.

Permalink Reply by Bill Smith on May 7, 2011 at 2:23am

I remembered this while driving home.  An application also may have processes that run in the background, in "batch" mode.  At the bank where I used to work, we had a background process that processed some large financial transaction files each morning.  Due to the database traffic, the whole system slowed down while that background process was running.  If your application has any background processes, you need to consider whether they are running and how much work they are doing.

Permalink Reply by John Phillips on May 13, 2011 at 4:16pm

Thanks a lot for your detailed guidance

 

What other measures (which you already derived 4 of them out of my 1 identified) can be used to measure the performance? Although, you mentioned that it is your need that identifies which measure you want to derive, but my concern is to learn the measures and then consider what will best fit the application need.

 

I hope you understood my point.

 

Moreover, can you share the impact of performance on cpu utilization, memory consumption, network utilization, disk space consumption, disk I/O rates and others (if applicable).

 

e.g. the more cpu utilization, the more the system is nearing to crash or system slowing down.

similarly, the more memory consumption, the less the system response

and so on.

 

Thanks