How do you identify performance issues when there is a third party web service involve :).

Scenario : Look at the above image carefully. According to that there is a web client which loads invoice data from external party. We use web service to access that external or third party server.

Question 01 : Suppose you have asked to measure the performance of this whole system then how do you measure?

I am going to measure the performance of web client using a tool. There are many performance measure tools available in the market for web applications but most famous ones are Jmeter, visual studio web performance and load test, LoadComplete by smartbear, The Grinder and Gatling.

Question 02 : Suppose there is a performance issue how do you identify what cause for the slowness. 

There can be three things cause for low performance. They are,

• Page loading issue.

Each browser there is plugins and extensions to measure page load time. Since I am using chrome browser for QA, it has extension called Page Load Time, which will give us the time takes to load the page. Following is the sample output of it, 

From above output we can understand how many time spent to load the content (Content loaded).

• Slowness in retrieving data from application server. 

This can be a network issue so you can measure using any network monitor.

•  Slowness of web service.

This is the one of big problem faced by many quality assurance engineers. There can be slowness in web service when the hits are increasing therefore we need to measure the performance of that as well. For that we can use famous tool SoapUI. We can use that tool to measure the output variance and can do the load testing as well.