A good, concise blog post about performance testing is dated yesterday May 2. Below is a summary of the points presented, along with some extracts directly from the post. See the whole article here.

Company Summary (from the site): Altentee provides quality software performance and test automation solutions through the intelligent use of open source alternatives backed by experienced professionals.

How to be a performance tester:

An article on Dzone's JavaLobby Three Common Application Performance Challenges for Developers written by Bhaskar Sunkara presents a high-level overview of some considerations for Java application engineers. The following is a concise summary.

The 3 main points are:

1. Memory Leaks
2. Slow SQL
3. Threading/Synchronization

The Problem is Poor Performance

Ouch! This was a shocking discovery because common sense would tell us that large companies have faster sites. You would think that their large budgets and a focus on customer service would result in high performance of their important retail web properties. Not so. Strangeloop published a study that shows surprisingly poor performance by many "big" sites.

From an executive's or entrepreneur's perspective, performance testing addresses risks of the software business related to:

• Corporate reputation - website failures make us look unprofessional
• User satisfaction - leaving site because of slow response costs us revenue
• Operational expense - system architecture and "horsepower" of hosting environment
• Opportunity costs - knowing where to invest in infrastructure for best ROI as you accommodate growth
• Continuity - make sure that the system doesn't crash when we are successfully driving traffic

Defining web performance testing sounds easy, but if you ask 100 web developers, you will probably get 100 different answers. The term is used in a variety of ways to cover what should probably be thought of as many types of testing; therefore, it is a broad name encompassing several definitions.

This is our best answer as it relates to web performance testing: