Glossary
16. Scalability
Scalability refers to the ability to handle additional workload, without adversely affecting performance, by adding resources such as CPU, memory, and storage capacity.
17. SLA
Service Level Agreement. In the context of performance testing, it is often the required level of performance (response time), availability (up time) or both.
18. Spike test
A spike test is a type of performance test focused on determining or validating performance characteristics of the product under test when subjected to workload models and load volumes that repeatedly increase beyond anticipated production operations for short periods of time. Spike testing is a subset of stress testing.
19. Stress test
A stress test is a type of performance test designed to evaluate an application’s behavior when it is pushed beyond normal or peak load conditions. The goal of stress testing is to reveal application bugs that surface only under high load conditions. These bugs can include such things as synchronization issues, race conditions, and memory leaks. Stress testing enables you to identify your application’s weak points, and shows how the application behaves under extreme load conditions.
20. Throughput
Throughput is the number of units of work that can be handled per unit of time; for instance, requests per second, calls per day, hits per second, reports per year, etc.
21. Utilization
In the context of performance testing, utilization is the percentage of time that a resource is busy servicing user requests. The remaining percentage of time is considered idle time.
22. Vertical scaling
Adding more (or faster) CPUs within the same computer system. See also: Horizontal scaling