What Is Scalability Testing - How To Test The Scalability of Application

9/17/2019 What is Scalability Testing?
How to Test the Scalability of an Application
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What Is Scalability Testing? How To Test The

Scalability Of An Application
Last Updated: August 21, 2019
Introduction to Scalability Testing:

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Scalability Testing is a non-functional test performance testing tools

methodology in which an application’s performance
is measured in terms of its ability to scale up or software test performance
scale down the number of user requests or other
such performance measure attributes. functional testing
Scalability testing can be performed at a hardware, regression testing

software or database level.
reliability testing
Parameters used for this testing differs from one
application to the another, for a web page, it could
be the number of users, CPU usage, network usage, while for a web server it would be the
number of requests processed.
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9/17/2019 What is Scalability Testing? How to Test the Scalability of an Application
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performance testing tools software test performance
functional testing regression testing
This tutorial will give you a complete overview of Scalability Testing along with its a ributes
and the various steps involved in performing the test with practical examples to enable you
to understand the concept in a be er way.
What You Will Learn: [show]
Scalability Testing Vs Load Testing

Load Testing measures the application under test under maximum load at which the system
would crash. The main purpose of load testing is to identify the peak point after which the
users would not be able to use the system.
Both Load and Scalability come under Performance Testing methodology.
Scalability differs from Load Testing in the fact that scalability test measures the system at
the minimum and maximum loads at all levels, including the software, hardware and database
levels. Once the maximum load is found out, developers need to respond appropriately to
ensure that the system is scalable after a particular load.
Example: If scalability testing determines the maximum load to be 10,000 users, then for the
system to be scalable, developers need to take measures on factors such as decreasing
response time after 10,000 user limit is reached or increasing the RAM size to accommodate
the growing user data.
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Load Testing involves placing Types

a maximum load on theTutorials
Of Testing developed applications at one go, while
 
scalability testing involves gradually increasing the load over a period of time progressively.
Load testing determines the point at which the application crashes, while scalability tries to
identify the reason for application crash and take steps to resolve the issue.
In short, Load Testing helps to identify the performance problems while scalability testing
helps to identify if the system can scale up to the growing number of users.
Scalability Testing A ributes

Scalability test attributes de ne the performance measures based on which this testing will
be performed.
Following are some of the common a ributes:
1) Response Time:
Response Time is the time between the user request and the application response. This
testing is done to identify the response time of the server under minimum load,
threshold load and maximum load to identify the point at which the application would
break.
Response time may increase or decrease based on varying user load on the application.
Ideally, the response time of an application would decrease as the user load keeps
increasing.
An application can be deemed to be scalable if it can deliver the same response time
for varying levels of user load.
In case of clustered environments where the application load is distributed among
multiple server components, scalability testing must measure the extent to which the

load balancer is distributing the load among multiple servers. This will ensure that one
server is not being overloaded

Types Ofwith requests while
Testing the other server is sitting idle
 Tutorials 
waiting for a request to come in.
The response time of each server component must be carefully measured if the
application is hosted in a clustered environment and scalability testing must make sure
that the response time of each server component must be the same regardless of the
amount of load placed on each server.
Example: Response time can be measured as the time at which the user enters the
URL on a web browser to the time until which the web page takes to load the content.
Lesser the response time, the higher the performance of an application would be.
2) Throughput:
Throughput is the measure of a number of requests processed over a unit time by the
application.
The outcome of throughput may differ from one application to another. If it is a web
application throughput is measured in terms of the number of user requests processed
per unit time and if it is a database. throughput is measured in terms of a number of
queries processed in a unit time.
An application is deemed to be scalable if it can deliver the same throughput for
varying levels of load on the internal applications, hardware, and database.
3) CPU Usage:
CPU Usage is a measure of the CPU Utilization for performing a task by an application.
CPU Utilization is usually measured in terms of the unit MegaHertz.
Ideally, the more optimized the application code is, the lesser will be the CPU
Utilization observed.
In order to achieve this, many organizations use standard programming practices to
minimize CPU Utilization.
Example: Removing dead code in the application and minimizing the use of Thread.
Sleep methods are one of the best programming practices to minimize CPU Utilization.
4) Memory Usage:
Memory usage is a measure of the memory consumed for performing a task by an

application.
Ideally, memory is measured in terms of bytes(MegaBytes, GigaBytes or Tera Bytes) that
the developed application uses in order to access Random Access Memory(RAM).
Memory usage of an application can be minimized by following the best programming
practices.
Examples of best programming practices would be not to use redundant loops, reduce
the hits to the database, use of cache, optimizing the use of SQL queries etc. An
application is deemed to be scalable if it minimizes the usage of the memory to the
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extent possible.
Example: If the storageTypes

space Of
available
Testingfor a speci ed number of users runs out of
 Tutorials 
memory, then the developer will be forced to add additional database storage to
compensate for the loss of data.
5) Network usage:
Network usage is the amount of bandwidth consumed by an application under test.

The goal of network usage is to reduce the network congestion. Network usage is
measured in terms of bytes received per second, frames received per second, segments
received and sent per second etc.
Programming techniques such as the use of compression techniques can help to
reduce congestion and minimize the network usage. An application is deemed to be
scalable if it can perform with minimum network congestion and deliver high
application performance.
Example: Instead of following a queue mechanism for processing the user requests, a
developer may write the code to process the user requests as and when the request
arrives at a database.
Apart from these parameters, there are few other less used parameters such as Server
request response time, Task execution time, Transaction time, Web Page loading time, Time to
fetch the response from database, Reboot time, Printing time, session time, screen transition,
transactions per second, hits per second , requests per second etc.
The attributes for scalability testing may differ from one application to another as the
performance measure for web applications may not be the same as that of a desktop or a
client-server application.
Steps to Test the Scalability of an Application

The main advantage of performing this testing on an application is to understand the user
behavior when maximum load is reached and the ways to resolve it.
Also, this testing allows the testers to identify server-side degradation and response time
with respect to the application user load. As a result, this testing is being preferred on several
organizations worldwide.
Given below is the list of steps to test the scalability of an application:
Create repeatable test scenarios for each of the scalability testing attributes.
Test the application for varying levels of load such as low, medium and high loads and
verify the behavior of an application.
Create a test environment that is stable enough to withstand the entire scalability
testing cycle. 
Con gure
Home the hardware
Resources FREEnecessary
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QA Testingthistesting.
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De ne a set of virtual users

Typesfor
Ofverifying
Testing the behavior of an application under varying
 Tutorials 
user load.
Repeat the test scenarios for multiple users under varying conditions of internal
applications, hardware and database changes.
In case of a clustered environment, validate if the load balancer is directing the user
requests to multiple servers to ensure that no server is overloaded by a series of
requests.
Execute the test scenarios in the test environment.
Analyze the reports generated and verify the areas of improvement, if any.
Conclusion
In a nutshell,
=> Scalability testing is a non-functional testing methodology to verify if an application can

scale up or scale down to the varying attributes. Attributes used for this testing will vary from
one application to the another.
=> The main objective of this testing is to determine when an application starts to degrade at
a maximum load and take proper steps to ensure that the developed application is scalable
enough to accommodate the changes in the internal applications, software, hardware and
also the database changes in the future.
=> If this testing is done properly, major errors with respect to performance in the software,
hardware, and database can be uncovered in the developed applications.
=> A major disadvantage of this testing would be its data storage limitation, with limits on the
database size and the buffer space. Also, the network bandwidth limitations can be an
impediment to scalability testing.
=> The process of scalability testing differs from one organization to another organization as
scalability test attributes of one application will be different from the other applications.
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9/17/2019 What is Scalability Testing?

How to Test the Scalability of an Application

Types Of Testing  Tutorials 

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