Saturday, July 27, 2013

What is benchmark testing?

Benchmark testing is the process of load testing a component or an entire end to end IT system to determine the performance characteristics of the application. The benchmark test is repeatable in that the performance measurements captured will vary only a few percent each time the test is run. This enables single changes to be made to the application or infrastructure in an attempt to determine if there is a performance improvement or degradation.

Benchmark testing can combine aspects of security testing.- An example in case is benchmark testing firewalls. This requires system and or user loads combined with security violations concurrently executed against the component to determine its performance benchmark.

The goals of benchmark testing typically fall into two categories;

To test the system to measure how a change affects its performance characteristics.

To test and tune the system to reach a performance requirement or service level agreement (SLA). In this case a series of benchmark tests are conducted in conjunction with iterative cycles of performance tuning.

1 comment:

prince2phore said...

Very nice blog ! One of the problems we're having with our benchmark tests is that we often have to change the environments we run them on, and also the different builds include more than a change at a time. It makes it very tricky to get consistent results and we lose a lot of time in verification runs before we can trust our results...