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If I have to load test an app for 40,000 users per hour with each user's average spent time of one minute then what should be my test approach?

Will running a test for 666 Threads/Users (40000/60=666) using ramping up period of 1 minutes and running JMeter for duration of 5 minute will be a valid test?

Thanks

Cedric
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1 Answers1

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It will be acceptable test, however it will not cover everything. As you mentioned, 1 minute is the average time, however it doesn't necessarily mean that each user will spend 1 minute. If 10% of users will decide to spend 5 minutes you will have 4000 users for 5 minutes and this scenario is not covered in your case.

So inspect your application access logs or look into an APM tool in order to determine real load pattern and configure your JMeter test to replicate it.

Also normally people are looking not only for replicating current (or anticipated) production load, they are also interested in

  • what is the saturation point of the application, to wit how many users it can serve providing maximum performance (before response time starts increasing)
  • what is the maximum load which application can handle before errors starts occurring or response time exceeds acceptable values
  • what is the slowest component (bottleneck) and what needs to be done to remove it
  • does application recover when the load gets back to normal or it remains in "broken" unusable state
  • what happens if you leave the application under a prolonged load (several hours, overnight, several days)

So I would recommend considering testing types other than load testing as well, i.e. conduct Stress Testing to determine breaking point, Soak Testing to check if there are any problems connected with long load duration like memory leaks, Spike Testing when load suddenly increases from zero to maximum seen online users in a moment, Scalability Testing (if your application scales - you might want to know if it does really scale and what is the slow down factor as it scales up). Check out Why ‘Normal’ Load Testing Isn’t Enough article for more detailed explanation of the aforementioned performance testing types and reasons of why do you need to apply them.

Dmitri T
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