Garbage In, Garbage Out: Your Load Test Results Are Only as Reliable as Your Test Environment
Making sure your load test results are accurate and actionable starts long before you run your tests — this post is all about how to set up your test environment.
If you’re new here, we’ve been on a crash course in load testing: starting with the goals of load testing and the role of a performance tester, the essential types of load test profiles, and open vs. closed workloads. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment!
This series of articles is based on my nearly 20 years of experience with performance testing in gaming, e-commerce, network infrastructure and finance. I maintain the open source load testing tool Locust, and recently started Locust Cloud so you don’t have to do the heavy lifting of setting up and maintaining load testing infrastructure.
A test environment for functional testing might simply be a virtual environment with all systems running scaled down to a minimum, without a lot of resource utilization. But for performance testing, ideally you want an environment that closely replicates your production environment’s performance.
