ReTestBash UK 2022 - Performance Testing 101 - Marie Cruz

🗓️ Events 🪐 TestBash
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Performance Testing 101 with @marie.drake

Talk Description

Have you ever heard of the term Performance Testing?

Do you get confused as to what the differences are between load testing, stress testing and soak testing?

Have you ever been asked to perform client-side and server-side performance testing but you’re unsure how to get started?

If you’ve answered yes to these questions then this talk is for you! As part of this talk, I will cover the following things:

  • Why do we need to test for performance?
  • The difference between client-side and server-side performance testing.
  • An overview of what metrics to consider when doing client-side performance testing.
  • An overview of what metrics to consider when doing server-side performance testing.
  • A quick glimpse at how to measure the performance of your favourite website using Google Lighthouse for client-side performance and k6 for server-side performance.

After this talk, you should be equipped with the knowledge and tools to use to get started with performance testing.

Takeaways

  • Understand the difference between client-side and server-side performance testing
  • Know the different metrics when it comes to performance testing
  • A quick overview on how to run performance test and analyse results from a Google Lighthouse report
  • A quick overview on how to use k6 Learn the technical skills to use k6 for back-end performance testing

We’ll use this Club thread to share resources mentioned during the session and answer any questions we don’t get to during the live session.

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Resources

Questions Asked Live

@vedantbajpai - What strategy or approach we should follow for performance testing in microservices environment?

@bethtesterleeds - Loved this talk - so much insight! You attend a lot of conferences and talks Marie - how did TestBash UK stand out from your perspective as a speaker?

@rharris - How often would you suggest running performance testing for a team that has no dedicated performance testers?

@kika - How much does the environment requirements weigh in while running performance tests? Do we have to match it to the production set up?

@laveenaramchandani01 - How to convince the management team to add performance as part of our DoD?

@tiwarip - How can we identify a CPU bottleneck on the application and how we can solve it? And also which tool we should choose LoadRunner or j meter for performance

Unanswered Questions

@sarah_oconnell - Could we add automated performance testing into a continuous deployment pipeline?

@mihaiudrea - I’m not very familiar with this subject, but theoretically, it looks like load testing can be used to prepare for DDoS attacks. Is this viable in real life?

@vedantbajpai - In terms of shift left approach, can Mocks be helpful in performance testing? Is it a good way or any better way for this scenario?

Anonymous - Does all the application require performance testing ?

@tressaking - How do we argue for performance when it is an system only for internal users (a production system)

@bethtesterleeds - How did the workshop go? Can you walk us through the format?

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@sarah_oconnell - Could we add automated performance testing into a continuous deployment pipeline?

– Yes, you can. Modern performance testing tools have been created to automate your performance testing efforts easily and integrate them into whichever CI/CD pipeline you are using.

@mihaiudrea - I’m not very familiar with this subject, but theoretically, it looks like load testing can be used to prepare for DDoS attacks. Is this viable in real life?

– You are right, load testing simulates a huge number of requests sent concurrently to your servers, so you can also introduce some DDoS attacks. I haven’t done this yet personally, though I don’t see how it’s not possible.

@vedantbajpai - In terms of shift left approach, can Mocks be helpful in performance testing? Is it a good way or any better way for this scenario?

– Mocks are useful, actually depending on your testing needs. If you want to test the performance of your application, say you want to do load testing, the data you are using doesn’t matter as much. What’s more important is how your application processes these different requests.

Anonymous - Does all the application require performance testing ?

– I’d say most applications, especially if you are an e-commerce website offering goods to customers. You can ask yourself the following questions to determine if you need performance testing or not:

  1. Do you care about your user experience?
  2. Do you have SLA (service level agreements) that you need to follow?

If you answered yes, then you need to have a performance testing strategy in place :slight_smile:

@tressaking - How do we argue for performance when it is an system only for internal users (a production system)

– My answer would be the same as the previous one :slight_smile:

@bethtesterleeds - How did the workshop go? Can you walk us through the format?

– The workshop was quite similar to the talk but we have the following activities in place:

  1. Discuss why performance testing is important and examples of websites that have frustrated them.
  2. Hands-on activities about metrics and load testing types
  3. Getting started with Google Lighthouse, Performance and Performance Insights
  4. Getting started with k6
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