I have a small problem and I would like to know the cause. I did a T1 test a few days ago on my project. The results were consistent, I was happy. The weekend is over, I decide to redo this same test (which we will call T2) (identical script and parameters). Problem: the results are completely different (my response times are much better and I have no errors, contrary to T1)
I thought that this difference came from the tests I could have done before T1: my server would not have had time to recover from the previous tests and the returned results would be inconsistent. But I tried again and the difference is still there between T1 and T2
I also submitted the hypothesis that, during T1, several background tasks were taking up bandwidth and could have influenced the test… But again, I tried to run T2 again but this time with connection-intensive sources in the background, but nothing happened.
Sorry, but I won’t be able to help you on this one. But let’s try to find a possible cause together.
If you have different results between T1 and T2, it means something changed during the meantime.
I know that a lot of organizations take advantage of weekend to upgrade either their OS, dependencies, softwares or hardware. It may impact your result in a way or another.
The bandwidth reason is perhaps in your whole organization, not only from your computer.
Maybe your server were full and during the weekend a restart clean their (erroneous?) cache.
As you had longer response times and some errors on T1, perhaps it was during a db backup?
Again, I’m sorry, but really, without knowing your context, it’s hard to tell you what is the root cause.
I hope these questions help you to find it yourself.
your load test generator mustn’t compete for resources (CPU, memory, bandwidth) with other processes on the same machine (eg run at the same time multiple load tests or Selenium/cypress or compiling code )
your target application mustn’t be performing other heavy task at the same time, unless it’s a desired test case (eg load tests during nightly batch operations)