Rapid Bottleneck Identification— A Better Way to do Load Testing An Oracle White Paper June 2009 Rapid Bottleneck Identification— A Better Way to do Load Testing Page 2 Rapid Bottleneck Identification— A Better Way to do Load Testing INTRODUCTION You’re ready to launch a critical Web application. Ensuring good application performance is crucial, but time is short. How can you optimally test the application and still meet your deadlines? Rapid bottleneck identification (RBI) is a new testing methodology that allows quality assurance (QA) professionals to very quickly uncover Web application performance limitations and determine the impact of those limitations on the end user experience. Developed through years of testing engagements across all types of platforms, the RBI methodology dramatically reduces load testing cycles while allowing more—and more thorough—testing. Using this approach, organizations can improve application quality, enhance the customer experience, and lower the cost of deploying new systems. PERFORMANCE TESTING DEFINED Performance testing can be roughly defined as “testing conducted to evaluate the compliance of a system or component with specified performance requirements.” However, every application has at least one bottleneck, and few, if any, systems ever meet initial performance requirements. To reflect this reality, let’s redefine performance testing as “testing conducted to isolate and identify the system and application issues (bottlenecks) that will keep the application from scaling to meet its performance requirements.” This philosophical shift in perspective—from testing as an evaluation to testing as an active investigation to isolate and resolve problems—is what drove the cre...
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