Tips For Measuring Application Performance

Here are some of important points which should be considered while measuring application performance.

- Test systems should match production as closely as possible. Same hardware, OS, and software.
- Populate databases with the number of records expected in production.
An application may perform well with a small number of records in the database. Performance could degrade a great deal as the number of records in the table(s) increases
- Test HTTP requests with different request parameters.
Test with the extremes. A page which performs a search may perform well when the search criteria returns a small result set, but perform poorly when the search criteria returns a large result set.
- Simulate expected traffic over time including short term spikes.
A page which performs well with low request volume can cause the server to fail under higher request volume.
- Use Server load testing tools (like Apache Jakarta JMeter) to simulate heavy load.