What is Load Testing? There are a lot of good definitions. Wikipedia: “Load testing generally refers to the practice of modeling the expected usage of a software program by simulating multiple users accessing the program concurrently. “A better way to define it may be to ask ‘what are the objectives of your load testing?’

We wrote a blog post three years ago about the objectives of load testing: #1 Common Sense of Load Testing. How have things changed?

We recently talked with some current RedLine13 customers about their objectives for load testing.  One response stood out.  It was short and succinct but it covered some topics that aren’t always discussed.  It was from Matt Ward of Glu, a leading creator of mobile games, about Glu’s objectives for load testing.  With his permission we’d like to share it with the load testing community:

1. Per application capacity and tuning.

2. Soak testing for long running stabilization testing.

3. Identify potential bottlenecks in various resources from memory, CPU, disk, through the data flow, from instance to data stores.

4. Testing applications ability to scale, especially auto scale.

5. Achieve an expected goal of Users and validate that the infrastructure can actually achieve the target scale cleanly.

6. Hopefully uncover issues related to scale in advance that where not accounted for, especially AWS soft limits, application bottlenecks, and general stability along the way.

When someone asks ‘what is load testing’, ask them what are their objectives for load testing. That will help you and help them load test better, load test faster for better performance.

Try RedLine13 for Free Load Testing and determine what is load testing and what are the objectives of your load testing.