During performance testing of software, developers are looking for performance symptoms and issues. Speed issues — slow responses and long load times for example — often are observed and addressed. But there are other performance problems that can be observed:
- Bottlenecking — This occurs when data flow is interrupted or halted because there is not enough capacity to handle the workload.
- Poor scalability — If software cannot handle the desired number of concurrent tasks, results could be delayed, errors could increase, or other unexpected behavior could happen that affects:
- Disk usage
- CPU usage
- Memory leaks
- Operating system limitations
- Poor network configuration
- Software configuration issues — Often settings are not set at a sufficient level to handle the workload.
- Insufficient hardware resources — Performance testing may reveal physical memory constraints or low-performing CPUs.