1.2.4 Throughput
Throughput means number of customer requests relative to some unit of time. For example, if a Commerce server can handle 10 customer requests simultaneously and each request takes one second to process, this site can have a potential throughput of 10 requests per second. Let us say that each customer on average submits 60 requests per visit. Then we can also represent throughput by estimating six visits/minute or 360 visits/hour.
Two common units for throughput are page hits/second and scenarios/hour:
- Page hits/second can have different meanings. For example, a page hit could refer to the single click that a customer does to download a composite Web page made up of many fragments. Alternatively, it could mean the total number of pages that actually get downloaded as result of that single click. Both of these interpretations have their significance.
However, most of the time we are interested in the first interpretation. That is, each page hit is a Web page from a shopper or user's point of view. So, for example, if the page that a customer requested was redirected to another page then the page hit would still be counted as one page. Similarly, if a JSP aggregates static and dynamic content from many other files the page hit would still be considered for a single page.
- Scenarios/hour is another very useful unit of throughput. A scenario is your test scenario approved by your test plan approvers (including your business analysts) to mimic your real business scenarios. In our testing we prefer this unit, as page hits/second can be misleading since it changes for each scenario, whereas scenario/hour is inherently relative to a scenario.
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