Performance Testing
I've been asked recently to conduct performance testing on one of the software products that we are developing. This is virgin territory for me and naturally I turned to Google for help.
One of the products that I found is a tool called NTime. NTime works in much the same way as NUnit, but instead of failing because of failed assertions or exceptions, it fails because the test did not run within a specified time. As far as I can see, the only use of this is where there are explicit performance requirements (e.g. the page must load in 3 seconds, etc.). As far as suggesting where the bottleneck is, it doesn't help much. What do you think?
I also stumbled across this article. It suggests running the same tests but by increasing the data in the database and the number of concurrent users independently. Doing this immediately suggests an optimisation. If a lot of data is put into the database and the tests take significantly longer to run, then the suggested optimisation is to tweak indices. Ca anyone think of any other variables to alter in performance testing?
Anyway, those are my initial thoughts. I'm really keen to know about any good performance testing resources out there, so let me know if you know any.