Performance testing

Testing for performance requires us to know what we are going to test, how we want to test, and what environment to set up for the tests to execute. There are several pitfalls to be aware of, such as a lack of near-real hardware and resources of production use, similar OS and software environments, diversity of representative data for test cases, and so on. Lack of diversity in test inputs may lead to a monotonic branch prediction, hence introducing a "bias" in test results.

The test environment

Concerns about the test environment begin with the hardware representative of the production environment. Traditionally, the test environment hardware has been a scaled-down version of the production environment. The performance analysis done on non-representative hardware is almost certain to skew the results. Fortunately, in recent times, thanks to the commodity hardware and cloud systems, provisioning test environment hardware that is similar to the production environment is...