Performance Testing checklist

I read a few days ago the Performance Testing Checklist from the ministryoftesting.com site and remembered about an old intention of creating a checklist with elements of a load test.

My last performance testing project was probably 2 years ago so the following info comes from memory.

I only worked on load and performance testing for web apps and web services so far.

The checklist applies to both with minimal changes.

If you prefer a mindmap to a long checklist, this is the link to it.

ANALYSIS

• What will be measured?

• application (web pages) response time
• throughput
• server resource utilization

• Pass/Fail criteria

• PASS: system performance during performance test <= baseline system performance
• FAIL
• system crashes during the load test
• system becomes un-responsive
• system performance during load test > baseline system performance

• Benchmark the system's performance under highest production load

• web pages' response times --> from Google Analytics
• server resource utilization --> from the Server Monitoring tools
• highest production application load

• busiest times of the app --> from Google Analytics
• highest number of concurrent users --> from the web server logs

• Define user scenarios

• get the most used pages from Google Analytics
• create a few user scenarios using the most used pages
• identify parameters of each page
• create test data for the parameters of each page

• Issues to be monitored

• application becomes not responsive
• application generates lots of errors under load
• the servers resources are heavily used
• application's response time is very high

• Performance testing environment isolation from production

• confirm that none of the components of the performance testing environment are used in production

PREPARATION

• Prepare test data

• Extract data from the production environment
• Modify it for the performance test
• Generate enough test data so it will not be re-used fast

• Performance test environment

• Application Environment

• Application Servers

• Web Servers
• Database Servers  
• Media Servers
• Search Servers

• Networking devices

• Load Balancer
• Firewall

• Performance Testing Environment

• Performance Testing Servers

• Management Server
• Agent Servers

• Application Server Monitoring
• Web Servers - Performance Counters

• CPU
• Memory
• Disk
• Network
• Operating System
• Web Server
• Application (.NET)

• Database Servers - Performance Counters

• CPU
• Memory
• Disk
• Network
• Operating System
• DB counters

• Application stability before the performance testing

• Run complete functional testing of the app
• Confirm that no critical issues are present

• Create Scripts for the performance testing user scenarios

• Wait time between scripts steps

• random times
• script recording times

• Create transactions for script steps

• Create parameters in the scripts and connect them to the test data

• Synchronize users in the script

• Remove any 3rd party dependencies' impact on the application

• 3rd party dependencies
• banners
• partner sites
• google analytics
• point all the 3rd party domains to 127.0.0.1

• Identify browsers and bandwidth types to be used for scripts

• Set up the model of loading users (user ramping)

EXECUTION

• Start monitoring of the application environment

• Start the performance test

• Let the performance test go for a long time

• Stop the performance test

• Collect results

• Performance testing tool reports

• Server performance counters

• Web logs

• Analyze the results by comparing them with the baseline info

• Report issues

• Fix issues

• Make changes in the application environment
• Fix code bugs
• Fine tune the performance testing scripts

• Repeat the performance test

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