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Throughput – indicates the number of transactions per second an application can handle, the amount of transactions produced over time during a test.

For every application there are lots of users performing lots of different requests. What you need to ensure is that your application meets the required capacity before it hits production or live. To ensure that, load and performance testing is the solution.

Choose different type of requests (frequent, critical, and intensive) and see how many pass successfully in an interval.

To solve the problem you should try to simulate load through load testing tools like LoadFocus to pick a mix of scenario for load testing, define concurrent users, number of loops etc. The load test should be simulated with real live data (users, requests etc)

Throughput depends on different factors:

  • specifications of the host computer
  • processing overhead in the software
  • degree of parallelism both hardware and software support
  • types of transactions being processed

Here’s what throughput typically involves in the context of performance testing:

  1. Data Transfer: The number of units of information (such as HTTP requests, transactions, or data packets) a system processes over a given period. It is usually measured in bits per second (bps), requests per second, transactions per second, or similar units.
  2. System Resources: It reflects the capability of the server to manage a certain amount of load, considering the resources like CPU, memory, network I/O, and disk I/O.
  3. Performance Benchmarks: Throughput provides a quantitative figure that helps compare the performance of different systems or the same system under different conditions.
  4. Bottleneck Identification: It helps to identify the limits of an application’s capacity by showing when the response time starts to degrade as throughput increases.
  5. Scalability Analysis: It’s used to determine how well a system scales with increased load. If throughput doesn’t increase proportionately with added resources, there may be scalability issues.
  6. Real-world Simulation: It allows testers to simulate real-world scenarios where a given number of users access the application simultaneously, thus verifying if the throughput aligns with expectations and can handle peak traffic loads.

In summary, throughput is a vital metric in performance testing that helps determine a system’s effectiveness in processing data under various load conditions. It serves as a fundamental criterion for assessing system behaviour and making informed decisions about system scaling and optimization.

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