An old Zen koan asks: "If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound?" In business, a product or service isn't worth much if the consumers have no access to it. The best e-commerce website would be a waste of time and money if it crashes after the first thousand users make a purchase. A mobile app is unlikely to make it if half of the ads do not show up during high traffic. A marketing campaign will cause only embarrassment if as a result of its success excited potential customers will come en masse and the web server will crash under load.

Performance Testing targets system's ability to deliver the functionality within a reasonable time and without exhausting the resources. Using special tools, performance tests simulate real-life environment and evaluate response time, memory use and processor utilization on the server, etc.

Conflair has expertise in several performance testing tools. However, it is our methodology that distinguishes us from the crowd:

Conflair usually plans and executes three types of Performance Tests:

• Load/Stress Tests: These tests target system's ability to handle concurrent transactions. During Load tests we execute simultaneously the highest expected number of concurrent transactions and measure the performance parameters. In Stress tests, we go beyond the expected number in order to find the breaking point, or to evaluate the scalability.
• Reliability Tests: These tests validate system's ability to function over time. Specifically, they are trying to check whether your application exhausts system resources – memory, storage, database – when being active for long periods without reset. This is a particularly common problem of mobile devices. Frequently overlooked, reliability-related issues cause big problems in production if not found and fixed during testing.
• Volume Tests: Today, your application might function well. Yet what happens in three years, when you expect to have seven million records in the database? Will you queries still run as quickly as they have to? Volume tests provide an answer to that questions.

Performance Monitoring asks an all-important question: what happens after the system goes live? Even with the most careful planning and accurate test execution, there is no possibility to foresee all the factors that impact application's performance in production. Performance Monitoring addresses this problem. The idea is simple: have a number of agents that run a transaction in production every once in a while, measure the response time and log the results. Add to that the ability to send out alerts when the performance level is below a certain threshold, and you've gained some peace of mind plus reduction in customer support stress.

Performance Testing and Monitoring, when properly planned and executed, can be very useful in ensuring that the application will bring value to the enterprise. Conflair can help you with that.