The primary goals of a load
test are as follows:
1. Determine the user limit for the Web application.
■ The user limit is the maximum number of concurrent users that the system can
support while remaining stable and providing reasonable response time to
users as they perform. a variety of typical business transactions.
■ The user limit should be higher than the required number of concurrent users
that the application must support when it is deployed.
2. Determine client-side degradation and end user experience under load.
■ Can users get to the Web application in a timely manner?
■ Are users able to conduct business or perform. a transaction within an
acceptable time?
■ How does the time of day, number of concurrent users, transactions and usage
affect the performance of the Web application?
■ Is the degradation "graceful?" Under heavy loading conditions, does the
application behave correctly in "slow motion," or do components crash or send
erroneous/incomplete pages to the client?
■ What is the failure rate that users observe? Is it within acceptable limits?
Under heavy loading conditions do most users continue to complete their
business transactions or do a large number of users receive error messages?
3. Determine server-side robustness and degradation.
Does my Web
server crash under heavy load?
■ Does my application server crash under heavy load?
■ Do other middle-tier servers crash or slow down under heavy load?
■ Does my database server crash under heavy load?
■ Does my system load require balancing, or if a load balancing system is in
place, is it functioning correctly?
■ Can my current architecture be fine-tuned to extract better performance?
■ Should hardware changes be made for improved performance?
■ Are there any resource deadlocks in my system?
