Not all performance test types are famously equal , some types are used less often than others.

That doesn’t mean of course that they are not important , they are and in some cases so important but unusual tests needs unusual situations.

I am going to focus on the following performance test types , we will discuss them in details and I will try to give an example.

• Endurance Testing
• Spike Testing
• Volume Testing

Endurance Testing : The less unusual type , in this test type we are executing performance runs for longer period of times (8 , 12 or 24 hrs) to test system availability and also to make sure that we don’t have some issues like “memory leaks”

The execution time should be based on the system operating time , a hosted web application which is available 24/7 , it is not operating 24/7.

Business / service operating time , is the duration the web application is actually functioning not only available , this vary according to the business domain

Example : Online Delivery web site which accepting orders from 10 AM to 10 PM is not functioning 24 hrs.

Spike Testing :

Some people are confusing this test with the load testing , but they are different in design and the impact as well.

As shown on the following graph , the application / service is facing an unusual users hit for a specific period of time and after that we are returning to the normal application load.

Example : An e-commerce application which promote 1 hour exceptional discount / offer should have a user spike for 1 hour and after that it will return to the normal user load or slightly higher.

Volume Testing :

The idea here is to perform your load testing but with different database sizes (volumes) to be sure that the system performance and behavior is not affected by the expected increases of system size.

Most of the time this type of test is needed when your system is dealing or storing a big amount of data , and we suspect that we may have a big increase in system size in a short time period.

Example : Governmental application which allow users to submit data with large volume (Ex.scanned documents , official documents) are likely hood to have a large set of data base size in a small period of time and achieve massive data size in the near future.

Please share your tips, experience, comments, and questions for further enriching this topic of discussion.