How to Setup a Better Performance Testing Environment?

Environment setup and maintenance are among the key activities in a software team’s work. QA specialists can monitor the setup of the test environment and drive the process of building test infrastructure.

Building a realistic test environment is essential for the success of performance testing services. However, it is also a challenging task that requires resolving technological, organizational, and security issues. This article can serve as a roadmap for building a faster and more efficient performance testing environment that leads to quicker deployments. So, let’s dive into it!

Why Is Test Environment Crucial for Software Testing?

A test environment is one of many factors that can help you optimize new software. It is parallel to a production environment, where you can test new applications, modules, and data import configurations. Also, it’s a great place to train users without compromising your actual data.

QA engineers use test environments for migration of solutions as well (different software versions, operating platforms, etc.) This step is crucial in the development of the system. Probably, you don’t need a detailed explanation of why a team needs a test environment, so let’s talk a bit about performance testing environment setup.

Designing a Performance Testing Environment

In an ideal world, a performance testing environment would be an exact copy of a production environment. But for a variety of reasons this is rarely the case. Here’s why.

• The number and specification of servers
  Probably, it’s one of the most common reasons. Taking into consideration the cost and complexity of the server, it’s impractical to provide a replica of its content and architecture in the test environment. Nonetheless, if you cannot replicate the number of servers at each application tier, you can try to match the specifications of the production servers.
• Bandwidth and connectivity of network infrastructure
  In a similar vein, it is uncommon for the test servers to be deployed in the same location as their production counterparts, although it’s often possible for them to share the same network infrastructure.
• Sizing of application databases
  The size and content of the test environment database should replicate the production environment as closely as possible. Otherwise, it will have a significant impact on the validity of performance test results. Executing tests against a 1 GB database when the production deployment will be 1 TB is not an option. Therefore, the typical performance testing environment is a subset of the production environment.

Sometimes tech teams decide to run performance testing in the production environment only. However, there are a set of additional considerations to take into account. In particular, it is crucial to consider the effect of other application traffic. Such testing usually takes place outside working hours to minimize external effects on the test results and the impact of the testing on the production environment.

Three Levels of Preference

So, performance testing needs a dedicated environment. Unless there is no way to avoid it, you shouldn’t try to use the same environment for functional and performance testing. When it comes to designing a performance testing environment, there are three levels of preference:

• An exact or close copy of the production environment. It’s hard to achieve due to practical and commercial reasons.
• A subset of the production environment with fewer servers but the same specification and tier-deployment of the production environment. This is frequently achievable. From a bare metal perspective, the specification of the servers at each tier should match that of the production environment. It allows software testers to accurately assess the capacity limits of individual servers.
• A subset of the production environment with fewer servers of lower specification. This is probably the most common situation. The performance test environment is sufficient to deploy the application, but the number, tier deployment, and specification of server may differ significantly from the production environment.

Five Methods of Performance Testing Setup

The process of performance testing setup is multifaceted and has a lot of nuances. Therefore, here are a couple of moments we want to pay attention to. To be more precise, it’s a simple five-step guide on methods that help to set load testing environments with necessary parameters.

1. Explore the application under test production and test environment (technical capabilities of network machines, load balancing, etc.)
2. Isolate the test environment to make sure that no one but your virtual clients can reach the tested application.
3. Isolate network to achieve sufficient throughput for testing and get accurate test results.
4. Select test data and ensure that the number of test records are the same in both the test environment system and database.
5. Delete the proxy server from the network path since it can have a significant impact on performance results.

Advice on Performance Test Environment Build

In addition to that, check out five tips on performance test environment building that could make the whole process more efficient for you.

• Take enough time to source equipment as well as to configure and build the performance test environment.
• Take into account all deployment models. There may be a need to test several different configurations over LAN and WAN environments. So, make sure that each of these can be created in your test environment.
• Take into account links to external systems. They are a favorable location for performance bottlenecks. Use real links or create some kind of simulation that represents external communication working as designed.
• Provide enough load injection capacity for the scale of testing estimated. Here you can consider cloud-based load injectors to simplify tasks.
• Deploy & configure performance testing tools along with KPI monitoring.

Final Thoughts

When it comes to performance testing, QA specialists should strive to make a test environment a close approximation of the production environment. If this is not possible, then at a minimum your setup should reflect the server tier deployment of the production environment. Meanwhile, your target database should be realistically populated in terms of both data content and sizing.

In this guide, we didn’t go in-depth into how to set up a performance testing environment on your own. As a rule, you can learn it by working directly in a team. But these are the basics that will definitely come in handy for QA specialists.