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Performance testing (Load) of web applications based on test case

management

Article in Perspectives in Science · April 2016

DOI: 10.1016/j.pisc.2016.04.073

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Rizwan Khan Mohd Amjad

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Perspectives in Science (2016) 8, 355—357

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

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journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/pisc

Performance testing (load) of web

applications based on test case
management夽
Rijwan Khan ∗, Mohd Amjad

Department of Computer Engineering, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India

Received 25 January 2016; accepted 9 April 2016

Available online 29 April 2016

KEYWORDS Summary This paper includes the importance of performance testing of web applications and
analyses the application’s bottleneck based on hardware, software and resource utilization.
Software testing;
The main focus of this paper is performance testing based on load test. It has been seen that
Performance testing;
everyone wants a very fast application, but at the same time, reliability of the application takes
Test cases;
an important role; so, customer’s satisfaction is the push for performance testing of a given
Load test
application. Performance testing determines how fast some aspects of the system perform under
a pre-defined workload. The performance testing is calculated by analyzing the production,
which comes from the application hosted on the server. The main performance is calculated
when business is at its peak by its hits.
© 2016 Published by Elsevier GmbH. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Introduction not know about what kind of work to do and what should
be the testing on the web application. So, a tester makes
Nowadays, for every web-based application, everyone wants its own importance felt by explaining about the testing
everything to be fast; but at the same time, there is concern procedure for web application. The tester checks it, as the
about the reliability for usage. With one click on a webpage, performance testing depends on the different parameters.
one wants to get loaded rapidly fast so that one can finish The economic growth of any organization is affected through
the work soon and switch to another work. If a page takes a its web application. If a web application is not running fast,
long time to load in the memory, one decides to give up this the interest of the people is lost in that business. Every
task. In many applications, it has been seen that people do organization nowadays is using the internet to conduct their
online business. So, it is important to understand the per-
formance of web application for any organization. The load
夽 This article belongs to the special issue on Engineering and Mate- testing is used to test performance of a website. This testing
rial Sciences. provides much information about the system behaviour
∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +91 9891676180. while handling the specific load given by the customer to the
E-mail address: [email protected] (R. Khan). system.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pisc.2016.04.073
2213-0209/© 2016 Published by Elsevier GmbH. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.
org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
356 R. Khan, M. Amjad

Table 1 Tools and utilities table. Table 3 Table for load test transaction load balancing.

Tools Performance Server Number of requests

Load Runner The tool is used to Application server 1 20,909

11.0 • Capture end-user business processes and Application server 2 21,121
create an automated performance testing
script, also known as a virtual user script.
• Organize, drive, manage, and monitor Test tools and utility
the load test.
• Create the load by running virtual users The following table describes the test tools and their per-
(VUsers). formance (Table 1).
• View, dissect, and compare the
performance results.
HP ALM To schedule and run the test for client’s Experimental setup
requirements for multiple users.
Perfmon logs To analyze the hits on the server for each Load run
request.
CA Wiley To analyze the performance bottlenecks, The objective of this load test is to execute 3 h of standard
if any. This would be used to monitor CPU test for the web application under test and determine any
and memory utilizations; other counters performance bottlenecks like high CPU utilization, memory
that would be monitored would be Disk utilization or any hardware issues. Also, failures would be
utilization, process queues, JVM out of also taken into consideration and would ensure that appli-
memory exceptions, etc. cation is stable throughout the 3 h duration. In this period,
spikes in response times and CPU utilization in servers have
been observed (Table 2).

The role of load testing in web application Observations

The monitoring of the system during load testing provides • Average transaction response times and 90‰ response
very useful information about the application; the customer times were under the SLA (service level agreement) of
can take decisions and reach a proper conclusion based on 5 s.
these results. Load testing can also raise alarm for more • All the targeted volumes for each business functionality
complex problems that arise in the application and fix the were achieved.
initial problems, so that complex problems will not rise. The • Load balancing to each server (2) was equally distributed.
main purpose of the load testing is to test the application • All the failures were due to data issues; but since the fail-
for measuring and make the report under an anticipated live ures were less than 10%, it was under acceptable limits.
load. The result during this type of testing can be end-user • CPU utilization on the application server (Tables 3—5).
response time, CPU response time and memory statistics.
These results give tester data to perform on it for bet- Throughput
ter response on the website application (Zhu et al., 2010;
Zhao and Shum, 2006; Menascé, 2002; Weyuker and Vokolos, The graph in Fig. 1 highlights the amount of bytes returned
2000). by the server during the course of load test. When the users

Table 2 Table for load test and response time.

Transaction name Average transaction 90% response Passed Failed

response time time

Case creation submit 4.392 4.587 723 2

Increase counter submit 2.111 2.321 634 0
Reduce counter submit 2.198 2.229 650 0
Close case final submit 4.921 4.978 245 0
Display page view 3.345 3.767 378 0
View alerts info 4.290 4.332 365 1
Scan report 0.361 0.562 1 0
Manual report 0.276 0.311 1 0
Print report 0.198 0.210 1 0
Alerts report 2.453 2.489 1 0
Cases report 1.134 1.270 1 0
 Performance load testing of web applications 357

Figure 1 Load test throughput pattern.

Figure 2 Load test hits per second pattern.

good sign when dealing with the performance testing. The

Table 4 Table for load test CPU utilization.
amount of hits in a second is highly fluctuating during the
Server Avg. CUP Max CPU initial ramp-up duration, and once all the users completely
utilization utilization ramped up, then the pattern becomes stable. On an average,
30 hits per second were observed.
Application server 1 41.60 49.01
Application server 2 43.78 48.54
Database server 65.32 82.12 Conclusion

The load has been tested with the help of HP ALM tool.
Table 5 Table for load test memory utilization. Throughput and hits per second observed during the load
test have been found. An application has been developed
Server Avg. CUP Max CPU and tested on this tool, and it observed all the load tests
utilization utilization that have been found more suitable with all other tools.
Application server 1 48.31 54.45 Throughput and hits per second were shown to be stabilized
Application server 2 55.62 67.87 during the load testing with HP ALM tool.
Database server 50.65 72.80
References
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