How to do functional testing for a website?

Scalability: How to find bottle necks in your website/web product while testing?

• We have a web product in closed beta. I want to test it thoroughly for bottlenecks if any. (Other than server) What are the best open source tools available for it ? What process can we use for it ? ps. :- We are using Django, Mysql, jquery For testing as of now we are using Jmeter. How can we best leverage the Django-toolbar to find bottle necks and solve them ?

• Answer:

  Hi, In my opinion, this is a very generic question. I am also not sure when you say bottlenecks other than server. My definition of "bottleneck" in system performance context is "a kind of constraint in any part of the system which restricts system from performing optimally OR giving you desired output". Bottleneck can happen because of simple thing like mis-configuration i.e. not setting correct connection pool size OR it can be complex i.e. bad application design which takes way longer to find out. In my experience, there cannot be a prescribed method for finding out bottlenecks. Try & Catch is the name of this game. At a high level "Try" will be combination of: testing (load testing & code profiling) + analysis + tuning. I think first you should define your own performance acceptance criteria: response time, system resource utilization (CPU, Memory, Network etc.) and throughput. Run tests and see if you are able to achieve the desired SLAs and if not then start finding out root cause for this. You will find good articles on internet on various aspects of performance result analysis. At least I am not aware of any tool which can help you find out bottlenecks directly. If you find one please do let me know. Cheers!!