Performance regression testing | Designing a test plan
High Availability testing
High Availability testing is a unique performance testing. Sometimes we can say that it is a combination of most types of performance testing, but they are customized performance tests. Based on the requirements about what the components with High Availability features enabled need to be tested, different types of performance testing can be driven to evaluate the functionalities/usabilities of High Availability components. To WebSphere Commerce site testing, the major purpose of the High Availability testing can be summarized as following:
- To evaluate whether the High Availability utilities are working and stable in a WebSphere Commerce environment
- To evaluate the performance impact from High Availability enabled utilities to normal operations of the WebSphere Commerce site. Sometimes it might result in performance degradation. Generally, the impact can be classified into different terms, such as throughput degradation, CPU utilization, memory utilization, network latency, I/O wait, data synchronization, and so on.
- To evaluate the capability of High Availability in the WebSphere Commerce site to handle different types of planned and unplanned outage. Different types of outages can be designed, mostly based on the requirements from customers, such as unplanned power outage, planned software maintenance/upgrade, unplanned process outage, unplanned network outage, and so on. Most of times, such types of outage should be simulated by automatic script or manually. It is up to which type of High Availability you want to achieve in the WebSphere Commerce Web site, and the frequency with which the outage will happen in a realistic production site.
- To evaluate the High Availability feeling from the customers' point of view. With High Availability utilities plugged into a WebSphere Commerce site, if any outage planned or unplanned happens, there should be no significant performance impact to the site, at least, from the customers' view, the outage should not be noticeable, or it should be eliminated as much as possibility.
High Availability is a topic that becomes more common than before, so that High Availability testing is important for customers to select an appropriate solution to provide High Availability to their Commerce site to achieve high customer satisfaction and stable revenue growth.