Potential Bottlenecks in Software Performance Testing

When coding up a small program, or developing a complete piece of software or application, you'll notice that some programs, or parts of it, run faster than others. This could be due to several reasons:

1. the slow execution time of a program
2. greater use of space
3. low RAM, etc.

After development, these programs are tested against certain metrics, which evaluate their performance. This would happen during the quality assurance phase of development. Why measure? They help identify the possible issues that may arise at any point in the application before the user uses it.

Understanding performance and resolving speed issues is crucial, as users prefer having applications that perform optimally. These metrics thus help improve the speed, scalability, and stability of different software.

Consider the case where you launch an application in the Google Play Store, and it performs poorly. It encounters low response time issues or utilizes a large amount of memory, and slows down the device. This would not be an ideal situation, and many people wouldn't use the product. To avoid situations like these, potential bottlenecks can be identified during the performance testing phase, so that applications can perform best once they are released to a larger audience.

In this lesson, we will consider the five most common bottlenecks that occur in applications during the performance testing phase. Rather than focus on small programs, we will consider an example of an application or software and understand the performance tests in this context.