How and Why to Load Test Your Web App

Load testing is a crucial step for any business that offers Software as a Service, customer-facing e-Commerce, or online enterprise applications to confirm the legitimacy of your offerings. You must load-test to ensure application reaction time, throughput, and scalability.

Developers may determine a system’s maximum working capacity and ensure it can manage anticipated demand without problems by load testing.

Why Load Test?

By doing load tests, you may find application performance bottlenecks before they occur. When you have many users, the last thing you want is for your application to be slow or crash.

You can determine your system’s maximum operational capacity through load testing and ensure it can handle the anticipated demand without problems. Load testing with Gatling is one of the best ways to mitigate potential issues with your business application.

This will improve your application and guarantee a seamless user experience.

Goals of Load Tests

Load testing requires building simulated user scenarios to imitate actual users’ behavior.

These hypothetical situations are intended to significantly strain the system and evaluate how it responds to diverse circumstances.

Load testing an e-commerce website may simulate many consumers signing in concurrently and exploring a variety of items in a load testing scenario, for instance.

The load testing tool logs response time and other performance indicators and produces a report that flags any problems.

How to use Gatling to Load Test

You do not need any technical knowledge to utilize Gatling to build scenarios that mimic thousands of users visiting your website at once.

Developers may design intricate load-testing scenarios for web applications using the open-source Gatling framework.

Load testing using Gatling involves the following procedures:

1. Define the user scenario: Creating the user scenario is the first stage of the load testing process using Gatling. Create a Gatling script, which is simply a text file containing the user activities you wish to imitate, to do this.
2. Configure the load: Configuring the load is the next step after defining the user scenario. You must do this by defining the test time and the number of people you wish to mimic. Other settings, such as the ramp-up time, which governs how rapidly the load rises, are also programmable.
3. Run the test: You may perform the test after configuring the load. Gatling will imitate user activities and track performance metrics like reaction time.
4. Analyze the results: Gatling provides a report with a summary of the performance metrics when the test is over. This analysis might help you locate any performance bottlenecks so you can modify your application accordingly.

Load testing assures that your application can manage anticipated demand without problems, which is a crucial step in software development. Gatling makes it simple to design intricate load-testing scenarios and find performance issues before they become problems.

How Manual Testing Compares to Automated

Load testing may still be done manually, even with automated solutions like Gatling. However, manual load testing may be a difficult operation that takes a lot of time and effort.

Manual load testing is manually imitating user behavior and developing user scenarios. You may accomplish this by assembling a team of testers who will all perform the same set of tasks. These tasks include signing in, visiting various pages, and completing forms.

The testers will track reaction times and other performance data and provide a report identifying any problems.

Summary

For any company that provides Software as a Service, customer-facing e-Commerce, or online enterprise applications, load testing is an essential step to ensure your services’ validity. Demand testing simulates a heavy load on a system to ascertain its response time, throughput, and scalability.