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During crucial performance testing session we need to monitor and measure various parameters/metrics to be able to analyze and understand why the application behaves in a certain way under a specific load.

Below ones are the most used metrics collected during performance testing sessions.

Vital performance metrics:

  • Processor Usage an amount of time processor spends executing non-idle threads.
  • Memory use – amount of physical memory available to processes on a computer.
  • Disk time – amount of time disk is busy executing a read or write request.
  • Bandwidth – shows the bits per second used by a network interface.
  • Private bytes – number of bytes a process has allocated that can’t be shared amongst other processes. These are used to measure memory leaks and usage.
  • Committed memory – amount of virtual memory used.
  • Memory pages/second – number of pages written to or read from the disk in order to resolve hard page faults. Hard page faults are when code not from the current working set is called up from elsewhere and retrieved from a disk.
  • Page faults/second – the overall rate in which fault pages are processed by the processor. This again occurs when a process requires code from outside its working set.
  • CPU interrupts per second – is the avg. number of hardware interrupts a processor is receiving and processing each second.
  • Disk queue length – is the avg. no. of read and write requests queued for the selected disk during a sample interval.
  • Network output queue length – length of the output packet queue in packets. Anything more than two means a delay and bottlenecking needs to be stopped.
  • Network bytes total per second – rate which bytes are sent and received on the interface including framing characters.
  • Response time time from when a user enters a request until the first character of the response is received.
  • Latency – the processing time that is needed on the server to process your request + the delay involved for the request to reach to server.
  • Error rate – represent the number of errors compared to the total number of requests that were done during the test.
  • Throughput rate a computer or network receives requests per second.
  • Concurrent Users is the number of virtual users that are active at any given point in time during a performance test cycle.
  • Requests per Second is the number of requests sent to the target server during a performance test cycle, including HTML, stylesheets, JavaScript.
  • Throughput is the number of kilobytes per second transmitted during the performance test cycle, which illustrates the amount of data flowing back and forth.
  • Average Response Time is the roundtrip time that it takes for a request from the client to generate a response from the server.
  • Peak Response Time is the longest response time that occurred within a given performance test cycle.
  • Amount of connection pooling – the number of user requests that are met by pooled connections. The more requests met by connections in the pool, the better the performance will be.
  • Maximum active sessions – the maximum number of sessions that can be active at once.
  • Hit ratios – This has to do with the number of SQL statements that are handled by cached data instead of expensive I/O operations. This is a good place to start for solving bottlenecking issues.
  • Hits per second the no. of hits on a web server during each second of a load test.
  • Rollback segment – the amount of data that can rollback at any point in time.
  • Database locks – locking of tables and databases needs to be monitored and carefully tuned.
  • Top waits – are monitored to determine what wait times can be cut down when dealing with the how fast data is retrieved from memory
  • Thread counts – An applications health can be measured by the no. of threads that are running and currently active.
  • Garbage collection – It has to do with returning unused memory back to the system. Garbage collection needs to be monitored for efficiency.

Cloud Testing Platform for Websites and APIs.

Written by Chris R.

LoadFocus is a modern cloud testing platform, a load and stress testing cloud tool which provides the infrastructure to run tests with thousands of concurrent users, from multiple cloud locations, in less than a few minutes, keep history of the results, compare different runs to inspect performance improvements or performance degradation. It also supports running JMeter load tests from the cloud and monitoring and audit web and mobile performance.

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