<< User Abandonment | Part 6 - Execute Tests >>

Design user delays summary

Check the abandonment rate before evaluating response times. If the abandonment rate for a
particular page is less than about 2 percent, consider the possibility of those response times
being outliers.

Check the abandonment rate before drawing conclusions about load. Remember, every user
who abandons is one less user applying load. Although the response-time statistics may look
good, if you have 75-percent abandonment, load is roughly 75 percent lighter than it was
being tested for.

If the abandonment rate is more than about 20 percent, consider disabling the abandonment
routine and re-executing the test to help gain information about what is causing the problem.

Summary

The process of designing realistic user delays into tests and test scripts is critical for workload
characterizations to generate accurate results. For performance testing to yield results that are
directly applicable to understanding the performance characteristics of an application in
production or a projected future business volume, the tested workloads must represent reality,
replicating user delay patterns.

To create a reasonably accurate representation of reality, you must model user delays with
variability and randomness by taking into account individual user data and user abandonment,
similar to a representative cross-section of users.