Measure Performance of Apps With Performance Testing Tools

Performance is a major factor of better user experience, so you required a tool that measures the system performance in all aspects like in case of system speed or response to access the web applications.

If the performance of the Application is not Good then what?

After 3 to 4 seconds 40 to 50 per cent of users or visitors will leave the site if that site fails to respond to the user or visitor request. That also leaves a negative impression on the user or visitor regarding that.

What Should You Do?

To overcome these types of situations or to provide a better user experience, performance testing is the best option. In today’s era, it is mandatory to measure the performance of the applications before launching that application because it directly affects the organization's repo and its market value.

In today’s era organizations should treat performance as a feature of the web application and it’s mandatory to measure its performance before launching that application.

The goal of the performance is to understand how your application will behave in normal and high or peak load conditions.

There are various open-source performance testing tools available in the market which measures the performance of web and mobile applications. Paid tools are also available in the market for measuring application performance.

Why Prefer Open Source Performance Testing Tools?

We have the following reasons to choose open source performance testing tools:

1. Free or Modest
2. No initial cost is involved other than the learning curve and training.
3. Customizable and Extensible
4. Easy to use to test at small loads.
5. Cross-Platform

Popular Open Source Performance Testing Tool

1. Apache JMeter: Jmeter is one of the leading load testing tools for web and application servers with the ability to measure performance. Jmeter is a java based desktop application designed to evaluate the performance of the web application under normal and peak load conditions.

By using Jmeter we can evaluate the performance of both the resources i.e. Static and Dynamic and these are followings:

• Files
• Servlets
• Perl Scripts
• Java Objects
• DataBases and Queries
• FTP Servers

2. The Grinder: The Grinder is a java based framework i.e. is available under a BSD style open source license. The Grinder is an open-source testing framework that allows the running of tests on multiple machines simultaneously.

The Grinder uses Jython to make the test scripts for the testing purpose of applications.

Features of the Grinder are as following:

• It uses Jython to create test scripts.
• It supports multiple protocols.

3. OpenSTA: OpenSTA aka Open Systems Testing Architecture stores a testing architecture that is based on CORBA to empower you for running tests across different networks. The current OpenSTA toolset has the ability to perform scripted HTTP and HTTPS heavy load tests.

Tests are performed using simple scripts, recordings and it also takes into account various results and statistics.

4. LoadUI: LoadUI is an open-source tool to perform a load test. This open-source test tool is responsible to execute load tests as well as performance tests.

LoadUI is a very useful and powerful testing tool that allows the user to create and update the test cases at the time of a run. LoadUI testing is called drag and drop testing which is very useful for doing testing of complex load tests.

5. Locust: Locust is a popular performance testing tool i.e. used by different companies. Locust performance framework is written in python. Performance scripts are also written in pure python for the Locust. Locust is mainly built for HTTP web-based testing. Locust also figures out how many parallel users a system can handle. Locust has a good web-based UI and it is good for the testing of the API.

6. Selenium WebDriver: Selenium WebDriver is one of the most fascinating automation testing tools. Selenium Web Driver is used to automate the web application testing to verify that it is working as expected. Selenium WebDriver supports many browsers like Firefox, Chrome, IE, and Safari. Selenium WebDriver also supports different- different programming languages i.e. C#, Java, Perl, PHP, and ruby. Selenium WebDriver uses these programming languages to write test scripts. Also, Selenium WebDriver is platform-independent that means the same code run on different OS i.e. MS Windows, Apple OS, and Linux.

[ Suggested Read: Case Study on Driving App Performance Testing Using Selenium ]

The Selenium WebDriver is considered to be one of the most widespread testing tools with Selenium IDE, Selenium Remote Control, Selenium Client API and Selenium grid at its disposal.

7. WebLOAD: WebLOAD is a load testing tool i.e. used for the web as well as for mobile. This tool evaluates the performance and scalability of the application as well as it also evaluates the verifiability of the application. Verifiability means “validating the correctness of return results”. WebLOAD uses Javascript to write test scripts.

The web load testing tool supports multiple protocols for testing and these are followings:

• REST/HTTP with Ajax support
• SOAP/XML
• FTP/SMTP

8. Gatling: Gatling is the best developer tool used to test the load of your web applications. It is designed to detect errors and performance issues early in the development cycle and give an immediate understanding of the slowest response times and app crashing.

The purpose of Gatling, an open-source performance testing tool, is to provide high performance, scenario recorder & developer-friendly DSL, and ready-to-present HTML reports.

9. Akamai CloudTest: CloudTest from Akamai is an integrated load testing tool that can proficiently test web applications' performance and verify any business website with user-based testing. This paid software allows for rapid test creations without using coding and has an in-built dashboard to merge analytics, including third-party data.

It eliminates the risk of poor customer experiences and provides a dynamic control on the load to identify and fix bottlenecks in real-time while testing.

10. BlazeMeter: BlazeMeter is the complete continuous testing platform used for 360-degree API testing, functional testing, performance testing, and mock services. It provides load and performance testing as a service and contains a web-based interface for running any JMeter scripts dynamically and creating static load tests.

It can run tests for multiple geo-locations and allow the uploading of URL lists. It gives 100% compatibility support with Apache JMeter and has enterprise features from real-time reporting, distributed testing, continuous integration with developer tools to application performance monitoring. Whether you want to measure your mobile app's performance with the iOS and Android operating system, BlazeMeter fulfills all your performance testing needs.

Now the question is which tools will be better to use from all these above-mentioned tools?

• All these tools have their own speciality. That all depends on the application requirement and client requirement as well as the knowledge level or the comfort level of the QA, which will evaluate the performance of the application.
• If the client wants to do the performance testing with the specific tool like JMeter or any other tool then you have to evaluate the performance of the application with that tool only. If some of the QA’s are comfortable with the tool’s GUI then they will proceed with the Jmeter, OpenSTA, LoadUI, and Selenium WebDriver. If QA is more comfortable with the programming language and wants to perform testing using programming languages like Java and python then they can be used Locust and The Grinder etc.
• It depends on the tool’s capability to test the application with the massive amounts of load i.e. application will behave normally as we increase the number of users or we can say that increase the load.

Concluding Remarks

In modern web development, performance testing is of supreme importance. These days, all user wants its application (Web application) respond quickly to its request even thousands of user access that application simultaneously. For user expectation, the performance of the application must be quite well. That will be achieved only when we measure the performance of the application before launching it into the market by using performance testing tools.

We, at BugRaptors, equipped with a team of experts that execute web and mobile app performance testing. We implement the performance testing effectively to determine the application speed is quite well under the normal and peak load conditions and application work correctly as per the business requirements and end-user perspective.