WHAT LOAD TESTING IS IN WEB DEVELOPMENT
By Milecia McG
You know that your website is hosted on a server, whether it’s in the cloud or in that cold closet on the other side of the office. Servers can only handle so much traffic before all of their resources are used up. Once those resources are at max capacity, users will have issues with the website and it will run extremely slow or crash. Before you get to that situation, consider doing some load testing.
What is the OpenAPI Spec?
Why we do load testing at all
You don’t want your website to go down when you start getting a lot of traffic, right? Load testing tells you the number of concurrent users your application can support and it lets you know if your server has enough resources to scale and run the application. Most businesses want to know this kind of information because they want to make sure that their website is always up.
When a website goes down because the server can’t handle the user load, businesses lose a lot of money really fast. Even if the website loads, if it takes more than a few seconds people will leave. Load testing gives you the assurance that you are able to handle any users that come your way. It also tells you if there is any lag between the client and server.
Once you finish testing, you will be able to see where your system can be improved. That might mean buying more server resources, like memory, or making performance enhancements to the software. You learn all of this before your website gets that rush of users so you can be better prepared for them.
How load testing works
The specifics of load testing depends on the system you are working with. Most cloud services have their own tools, but there are third-party tools available too. Regardless of the tool you decide to use, there are some general steps you can take to perform a good load test.
First, you’ll need to make a testing environment. This could be the development or QA environment if you have clearance to use them for this purpose. You never want to do load testing in production simply because there are real users accessing that application. After you have the test environment ready, decide what kinds of test transactions you want to use.