What Is Throughput in Performance Testing?

Software performance testing has been around almost as long as software itself, and for good reason. Ensuring that your software is tested and performing well can help attract users, protect revenue, and reduce the risk of costly downtime.

Software users want a fast, smooth, and simple experience. This is where software performance testing platforms like LoadView come in. If users constantly experience errors or slow response times when using your websites and applications, they are more likely to look elsewhere for the service you provide. Professional load and performance testing is an important part of any serious development process for mission-critical websites and web applications. In this article, we look at the concept of throughput as it pertains to performance testing.

What Is Performance Testing?

The process of performance testing your software can be broken down into three categories.

• Stability: How effectively your software performs under a given load.
• Speed: How quickly your software responds to a given command.
• Scalability: How many users your software can handle before its performance begins to suffer.

Performance testing aims to ensure that your software is performing to the best of its ability. If an issue is discovered during the testing process, your team can assess and resolve it before it becomes a problem for users at scale. Performance testing is an essential part of any serious development process, whether you are launching a new website or application, adding new features, or preparing for higher traffic.

Types of Performance Testing

There are several types of performance testing that can help your software, depending on your needs. Below is a list of the most common types of performance testing you should consider.

• Endurance testing is used to assess whether your software can handle a given load over an extended period of time. If your software experiences sustained traffic during a holiday, registration period, or major campaign, you want to know that it will not crash unexpectedly.
• Load testing is a form of testing that attempts to locate and resolve potential bottlenecks and assess software’s ability to perform under a given user load.
• Scalability testing is a way to see how effectively your software scales up when it’s put under a heavier load. This type of testing also helps with future capacity planning.
• Spike testing is used to determine how your software reacts when it’s suddenly met with a large spike in users.
• Stress testing is a way to find out what your software’s breaking point is. Testing teams find this information by exposing your software to extreme workloads to understand how it performs under high levels of traffic or data processing.
• Volume testing is a method used to measure the performance of your software when it’s put under a certain amount of database volume.

These forms of performance testing are used in different situations, but throughput in performance testing is sometimes less understood than these test types. Let’s take a closer look.

Throughput in Performance Testing

Throughput can be tricky to grasp at first, but it’s a crucial element in the performance testing process. The general goal of throughput in performance testing is to determine how many requests, transactions, or operations your software can handle per second, minute, or hour. Throughput is often represented as transactions per second (TPS), requests per second (RPS), or similar metrics depending on what is being measured. Every test plan should have a throughput goal, and the more realistic your throughput goal is, the more useful your results will be.

Ensuring that your throughput goal realistically reflects the expected demand on your software is important because it can affect the user experience. Throughput is especially important for modern applications that rely on APIs, databases, third-party services, and distributed systems. If one part of the system cannot process requests fast enough, users may experience delays even if the rest of the application appears healthy.

Here are some questions to keep in mind when thinking about getting your software performance tested:

• Types of connections: Network connection types can greatly affect system response times and the user experience. The goal is to make the user’s experience as streamlined as possible.
• User behavior: Users may interact with software in different ways, such as purchasing items, submitting documents, logging in, searching, downloading files, or interacting with other users.
• User profiles and quantity: You should understand why users will be using your software and how many users may perform key actions during peak periods.

Throughput in performance testing is best assessed when you understand your software’s users and their behavior. This allows you to anticipate performance issues, set realistic testing goals, and better manage user expectations.

Throughput in Real Life

Imagine that there’s a bank with only three bank tellers helping account holders. Let’s say that no matter how complex the issue is, each bank teller can help one account holder per minute.

If three bank tellers can each help one account holder per minute, then the total number of account holders helped per minute would equal three. In a performance report, we would record that this particular bank is capable of helping three account holders per minute, meaning that the total number of account holders helped in an hour would be 180.

Though this appears to be an efficient bank, no matter how many account holders walk into the bank, the bank tellers will only ever be able to help three account holders per minute. The number of account holders waiting for service doesn’t increase the number helped over the course of a minute.

Therefore, helping three account holders per minute would be the bank’s fixed upper-bound constraint.

This same concept applies when we test a software application. If a software application receives 100 requests per second but can only handle 80 per second, the remaining 20 requests may be queued, delayed, or rejected depending on how the system is designed. The overall goal is to prevent users from waiting too long, seeing errors, or abandoning the application.

Performance Test With LoadView

The bottom line is that web application users want reliable software, and they’re not hesitant to move to a competitor if your product isn’t performing at the level they expect. This is why it’s crucial to be proactive when it comes to performance testing your software.

The most successful businesses understand the importance of performance testing their software. It not only helps provide users with a better experience, but it can also save significant amounts of money in the long run. Software users will compare your product with competitors, and the performance of your web application could be the reason they stay or go.

Modern users are impatient when it comes to slow or unreliable digital services. While downtime is something every business and software owner hopes to avoid, it’s equally important to ensure that your software has quick response times and enough throughput to handle real user demand. Skipping performance testing could lead to slower experiences, lost users, and lost revenue.

Even if you’re unsure whether performance testing is necessary for your software, you can schedule a discovery call. Our consultants will be happy to answer your performance testing questions and provide the best course of action based on your software’s needs. You can also start performance testing right away with a free LoadView trial.