sethdford Performance Test Plan
Strategy for measuring and verifying performance characteristics.
Context
You are designing performance tests. Measure baseline, set thresholds, identify bottlenecks.
Domain Context
- Load Testing: How system behaves under expected/peak load
- Stress Testing: At what point does system break?
- Profiling: Where do CPU/memory/I/O bottlenecks exist?
- SLA Verification: Does system meet response time, throughput commitments?
- Regression Detection: Did recent changes degrade performance?
Instructions
- Define SLAs: Response time P99? Throughput? Memory budget?
- Create Load Profile: How many users? What do they do?
- Measure Baseline: Establish baseline metrics before optimization
- Profile Hot Paths: Identify which code consumes CPU/memory
- Set Thresholds: Alert if response time exceeds target
- Run Regularly: Performance tests in CI to catch regressions
- Compare Versions: Before/after comparison for optimization
Anti-Patterns
- Performance tests that are flaky or environment-dependent; unreliable signals
- Benchmarking without realistic load; lab results don't match production
- Micro-optimizations without profiling; premature optimization is evil
- Ignoring memory leaks in performance tests; good data won't show memory creep
- Setting unrealistic SLAs; know your hardware limits
Further Reading
- Brendan Gregg, Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud
- Martin Fowler, Profiling essay