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9/17/2019 What is Scalability Testing? How to Test the Scalability of an Application
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This tutorial will give you a complete overview of Scalability Testing along with its a ributes
and the various steps involved in performing the test with practical examples to enable you
to understand the concept in a be er way.
Scalability differs from Load Testing in the fact that scalability test measures the system at
the minimum and maximum loads at all levels, including the software, hardware and database
levels. Once the maximum load is found out, developers need to respond appropriately to
ensure that the system is scalable after a particular load.
Example: If scalability testing determines the maximum load to be 10,000 users, then for the
system to be scalable, developers need to take measures on factors such as decreasing
response time after 10,000 user limit is reached or increasing the RAM size to accommodate
the growing user data.
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9/17/2019 What is Scalability Testing? How to Test the Scalability of an Application
Load testing determines the point at which the application crashes, while scalability tries to
identify the reason for application crash and take steps to resolve the issue.
In short, Load Testing helps to identify the performance problems while scalability testing
helps to identify if the system can scale up to the growing number of users.
1) Response Time:
Response Time is the time between the user request and the application response. This
testing is done to identify the response time of the server under minimum load,
threshold load and maximum load to identify the point at which the application would
break.
Response time may increase or decrease based on varying user load on the application.
Ideally, the response time of an application would decrease as the user load keeps
increasing.
An application can be deemed to be scalable if it can deliver the same response time
for varying levels of user load.
In case of clustered environments where the application load is distributed among
multiple server components, scalability testing must measure the extent to which the
load balancer is distributing the load among multiple servers. This will ensure that one
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9/17/2019 What is Scalability Testing? How to Test the Scalability of an Application
2) Throughput:
Throughput is the measure of a number of requests processed over a unit time by the
application.
The outcome of throughput may differ from one application to another. If it is a web
application throughput is measured in terms of the number of user requests processed
per unit time and if it is a database. throughput is measured in terms of a number of
queries processed in a unit time.
An application is deemed to be scalable if it can deliver the same throughput for
varying levels of load on the internal applications, hardware, and database.
3) CPU Usage:
CPU Usage is a measure of the CPU Utilization for performing a task by an application.
CPU Utilization is usually measured in terms of the unit MegaHertz.
Ideally, the more optimized the application code is, the lesser will be the CPU
Utilization observed.
In order to achieve this, many organizations use standard programming practices to
minimize CPU Utilization.
Example: Removing dead code in the application and minimizing the use of Thread.
Sleep methods are one of the best programming practices to minimize CPU Utilization.
4) Memory Usage:
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9/17/2019 What is Scalability Testing? How to Test the Scalability of an Application
5) Network usage:
Apart from these parameters, there are few other less used parameters such as Server
request response time, Task execution time, Transaction time, Web Page loading time, Time to
fetch the response from database, Reboot time, Printing time, session time, screen transition,
transactions per second, hits per second , requests per second etc.
The attributes for scalability testing may differ from one application to another as the
performance measure for web applications may not be the same as that of a desktop or a
client-server application.
Also, this testing allows the testers to identify server-side degradation and response time
with respect to the application user load. As a result, this testing is being preferred on several
organizations worldwide.
Create repeatable test scenarios for each of the scalability testing attributes.
Test the application for varying levels of load such as low, medium and high loads and
verify the behavior of an application.
Create a test environment that is stable enough to withstand the entire scalability
testing cycle.
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9/17/2019 What is Scalability Testing? How to Test the Scalability of an Application
Conclusion
In a nutshell,
=> The main objective of this testing is to determine when an application starts to degrade at
a maximum load and take proper steps to ensure that the developed application is scalable
enough to accommodate the changes in the internal applications, software, hardware and
also the database changes in the future.
=> If this testing is done properly, major errors with respect to performance in the software,
hardware, and database can be uncovered in the developed applications.
=> A major disadvantage of this testing would be its data storage limitation, with limits on the
database size and the buffer space. Also, the network bandwidth limitations can be an
impediment to scalability testing.
=> The process of scalability testing differs from one organization to another organization as
scalability test attributes of one application will be different from the other applications.
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