Key takeaways
- Throughput and response time diverge under load: throughput plateaus while response time climbs.
- The knee in that curve is your real capacity, not the maximum throughput figure.
- Report both. Either one alone can be made to look good.
Website loading
Have you ever wondered what happens when you visit a website or use an app that takes a long time to load? It seems to take an eternity at times! This is where software testing comes in.
Use our load test tool you can test how well a website or app can handle a large number of people, all while using it at the same time.
Throughput
When we test a website or app, we pay close attention to something called “throughput.” Throughput is a measure of how many people can use a website or app concurrently without becoming too slow or crashing. It’s like a road – if there are too many cars on it, it slows down and people start honking their horns! Throughput tells us how many “cars” the website or app can handle before becoming too slow.
You can even view this in real-time when running load tests using LoadFocus.
Response Time
Another important thing we look at is “response time“. This is like how long it takes for the website or app to do something when you click on a button or link. It’s like if you ask your mom for a snack and she takes a long time to bring it to you – you start to get hungry and frustrated! We want the website or app to be really fast, so people don’t get frustrated and leave.
If you are familiar to Apache JMeter, you can also upload your test scripts in the cloud using JMeter Cloud Load Test tool and run your tests with tens of thousands of users from multiple cloud test locations.
Are Throughput and Response Time Related?
Throughput and response time are related. The average transaction’s response time tends to decrease as overall throughput increases. However, by allocating a disproportionate amount of resources to a specific query, you can reduce response time at the expense of overall throughput.
That’s all there is to it! When we test websites and apps to ensure they work well for a large number of people, we pay close attention to throughput and response time. Just as we want our roads to be able to handle a large number of cars without becoming too congested, we want our websites and apps to be able to handle a large number of users without becoming too slow or frustrating.
LoadFocus is an all-in-one cloud testing platform that allows you to easily perform load and performance tests to ensure that your website, application or API can handle high traffic volume and usage. One of the key metrics that you can measure with LoadFocus is response time and throughput.
Frequently Asked Questions
How are throughput and response time related?
They track together until the system saturates. After that, throughput plateaus while response time keeps climbing, because requests are queuing rather than being served faster.
Where is my real capacity?
At the knee in that curve, where response time starts rising while throughput stops. The maximum throughput figure is usually past the point where the experience became unacceptable.
Why report both numbers?
Because either one alone can be made to look good. High throughput with terrible latency, or excellent latency at trivial load, are both easy to produce and neither describes the system.
