Full Stack Testing

Chapter 8. Performance Testing

Time is money!

—Benjamin Franklin

We’ve all experienced it: sometimes our favorite websites suddenly become as slow as sloths, leaving us wondering, “Is there a problem with my internet?” Remember waiting an eternity during the Cyber Monday sales for a website to load? Or staring at the loading icon waiting for train tickets to show up when you are dying to book your Christmas vacation? Or being left hanging on the booking page for a blockbuster movie? Poor website performance in cases like these can cause us as customers to feel intense frustration.

If you want to save your application’s end users from such frustrations, you have to continuously measure and work to improve its performance. This chapter aims to equip you with the essentials you need for measuring or testing web performance—specifically, we’ll cover topics like performance KPIs, API performance testing, frontend performance testing, and shift-left performance testing. You will also get a chance to try both frontend and API performance testing hands-on as part of this chapter’s exercises.

Because performance testing is such a large topic and must be done both on the backend and the frontend, this chapter is structured a little differently from the previous ones. You’ll find all the familiar sections here, but split into two halves. We’ll start by covering everything you need to know to get up to speed with backend performance testing, including exercises and additional ...