Performance Testing Best Practices on Production System

Performance Testing Best Practices on Production System

Although the various reasons due to which it’s important to conduct the performance testing on production system have been discussed however there are still lots of issues and concerns (some of them have been discussed in the above section) on the basis of which the companies are hesitant to go for it. In this section, we will discuss some of the best practices that can be opted to minimize the impacts of performance testing on production system.

Testing During Maintenance Window

Almost all the large organizations’ applications go for scheduled maintenance and during that period of time they restrict their users from interacting with the application. You can co-ordinate with responsible teams and plan out your performance testing activity during this scheduled downtime without affecting actual users’ experience.

Test before Release

One of the best approaches could be to test the application just before making it available for actual users. You can include application performance testing part of your release management plan to make sure that performance tests are always executed before releasing the application.

Test during Off-Hours of Off-Days

Conduct the performance testing during off-hours of the off-days if you are not left with any of the above two options. Minimum number of application actual users is affected on conducting the performance testing at this schedule. It not only helps in minimizing the impact of testing on real users activities but also in identifying the bottlenecks root-causes. The best and most suitable time considered for such approach is midnight Saturday or Sunday.

Test Read-only Transactions

Many companies don’t prefer to do any testing activity on their production system due to the fear that the test data might get mixed with the actual applications users’ data. Especially in case of business critical applications, companies are not willing to take even the minor risks. That is why production database is almost never used in testing and even if it’s used, it’s used only for the read-only operations. These simple transactions don’t affect the application data but can reveal important performance bottlenecks.

Increase Load Gradually

One approach that could be exercised to minimize the impact of performance testing on real users is to increase the simulated users gradually unless the real users’ transactions are within the acceptable threshold. We have mentioned above that performance testing is not all about breaking the system but also to find out the application behavior under normal conditions. Run a test and increase the load gradually unless the users’ response time is within the acceptable range and they are able to successfully perform their transactions. Then analyze the test results, fix the bottlenecks and re-test. You can thoroughly test any application for most of its bottlenecks in multiple iterations without actually impacting the real users, however they will be experiencing slower user experience but still will be able to complete their transactions.

Careful Monitoring and Continuous Communication during Test Execution

The performance testing approach and its expected outcomes along with the involved risks should be clearly communicated to all the stakeholders. Moreover, you need to be very pro-active while testing on the production system and all the stakeholders should be carefully monitoring the test and test should be stopped immediately if and when it affects the actual users beyond their acceptable threshold.