Performance testing is about ensuring that the user gets the reply to his request in a timely fashion without considering concurrent accesses, and addressing bottlenecks. Once performance testing has been done, scalability testing is then performed to address potential bottlenecks arising with concurrent accesses. Scalability testing will be explained in a separate presentation.
When performing performance testing, first of all, a performance test plan has to be defined according to the most common tasks performed by users. Secondly, tasks must be group together by relevancy, where each operation of a group defines precisely realistic and acceptable times elapsed for the round-trip from an user point of view. Thirdly, a script must be written for each group gathering reproducible results. These script usually rely on an existing tool or framework.
This presentation will explain how to perform these three steps by giving a simple example and will rely on erp5.utils.test_browser Python package as the performance testing framework.