Web Performance Testing: Methodologies, Tools and Challenges

The Internet is gently becoming the essential requirement for the business world, with web applications as the brains. This means that software faults in web applications have potentially disastrous consequences. Most work on web applications has been on making them more powerful, but relatively little has been done to ensure their quality. Important quality attributes for web applications include reliability, availability, interoperability and security. Web Performance testing is a type of testing intended to determine the responsiveness, reliability, throughput, interoperability and scalability of a system and /or application under a given workload. It could also be defined as a process of determining the speed or effectiveness of a computer, network, software application or device. Testing can be conducted on software applications, system resources, targeted application components, databases and a whole lot more. It normally involves an automated test suite as this allows for easy, repeatable simultaneous a variety of normal peak and exceptional load conditions. Such forms of testing help verify whether a system or application meets the specifications claimed by its vendor. This paper emphasis on methodology of performance testing and explains about various diagnostic tools to implement testing to overcome from single point of failure. This paper also explains about challenges of web performance testing and helps for one who takes up further research activity.