Automated Performance Testing

In today’s market a slow system can cause your customers to feel frustration and cause potential customers to look elsewhere. Good performance is one of those things that you don't notice until it isn't there. Everyone notices slow performance. That dreaded hourglass on the screen that lingers and lingers... or even worse where it just stops responding altogether or crashes.

Applications under development today, especially Web-based applications, may be called upon to support hundreds or even thousands of simultaneous users. Sometimes it's not possible to assess probable performance and identify potential bottlenecks without simulating the production environment under load.

Why should I care about performance testing?

Performance testing is done for two reasons. The first reason is to ensure that the system will meet the current and short-term needs of the business. To establish how much performance can be extracted from the system as it exists today. To find the degradation point before your customers do.

The second reason is to plan for a time when something must be done in order to support a greater load. This may include rewriting portions of the solution, restructuring the solution, or adding more hardware. Doing performance testing now helps you understand the effort that may be necessary to move past the performance limits of the system as it exists today, as well as how to support known constraints of your system.

What is performance testing?

There is not one single thing called performance testing. It is made up of several different aspects - responsiveness, throughput, scalability, and reliability. These items together determine if your system is actually performing well or not. Bottlenecks only become apparent when they are constraining the performance of the system.

Why ProtoTest?

ProtoTest designs and executes performance tests to enable you to answer critical questions:

• How many users will this application support concurrently with optimal performance throughput?
• How will performance degrade as load (either users or throughput) increases?
• What are the bottlenecks to performance?
• How will the application scale?
• How reliable is the application?

ProtoTest has solid relationships with world-class tool vendors, and experience with open-source tools, that allow us to craft a performance strategy specifically for you. We can test for just a few dozen users, or thousands and thousands. Our hardware can scale to meet your needs. Let us find your performance problems before your customers do.

For more information, contact us.