How to Do Performance Testing

Intro

Odds are pretty good that your production application has some kind of performance monitoring in place (e.g., New Relic). This goes a long way towards identifying when something detrimental has been released into the wild.

But how do you catch performance issues before they reach production?

A Solution

By repurposing a Selenium script, we can run it through a proxy server and capture the HTTP traffic. With this traffic, we can run some simple checks to see if the application's performance has degraded.

Let's dig in with an example.

About The Author

Dave Haeffner is the original writer of Elemental Selenium -- a free, once weekly Selenium tip newsletter that's read by thousands of testing professionals. He also created and maintains the-internet (an open-source web app that's perfect for writing automated tests against).

Dave has helped numerous companies successfully implement automated acceptance testing; including The Motley Fool, ManTech International, Sittercity, and Animoto. He is also an active member of the Selenium project and has spoken at numerous conferences and meetups around the world about automated acceptance testing.