Objectives of this Article:

•   Information that are required for load testing a system

•   Where to obtain these information from?

•   Organizing the system information collected

•   Using the information effectively to carry out Load Tests.

Business Transactions

A business transaction is a set of user actions performed with an application to accomplish a business task.

Examples:
  Reserving flight tickets
  Buying a computer from a online store
  Logging into your web-based email service

Vital Information for any Load Test

• The architecture of the system

• A brief idea about the application.

• The list of business transactions

• The time at which the system has peak load

• The acceptable response time for the transactions

• No. of concurrent users the system is expected to handle during peak load

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How to Obtain?

•   IT documentation

•   Application users

•   IT Managers

•   System Administrators

•   Server and online statistics

•   Developers

Getting Organized

•   Select the Transactions to automate

•   Decide on the Transaction Mix

•   Obtain User details for the transactions

•   The tables these transactions query

•   The web server / application server components invoked by the transactions

Select the transactions

•   Give priority to business critical transactions

•   Give priority to transactions that have high database activity

•   Give priority to transactions that have high web server or application
    server activity

•   Know the peak load time
  

Decide on Transaction Mix

•   Impact of the failure of a particular transaction on business 
  

•   The transactions that are fired during peak load

•   the no. of times they are fired during peak load
  

User details

For each of the chosen transactions find

•   Who are the users who fire the transaction?

•   How many concurrent users are there?

•   How often they fire the transactions?
  

For each of the chosen transactions find

Tables queried

•   The tables the transaction queries

•   The tables the transaction updates

Server components invoked