Zarina Sprague

If you suddenly find yourself with high blood pressure (hypertension) under the new guidelines from the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, you might be wondering what to do. The guidelines lowered the definition for high blood pressure to 130/80 from 140/90 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg), meaning more people now meet the criteria for stage 1 hypertension.

While you shouldn't shrug off the change, there's also no need to panic. "Obviously, nothing happened overnight inside a woman's body or to her health with the release of the guidelines," says Dr. Naomi Fisher, director of hypertension service and hypertension innovation at the Brigham and Women's Hospital Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Hypertension, and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

The change, however, should spur you to take your blood pressure seriously. "These guidelines have been long anticipated and are very welcome by most hypertension experts. They may seem drastic, but in putting the knowledge we've gained from large trials into clinical practice, they will help thousands of people," says Dr. Fisher.

If you are in this 130/80 range, reducing your blood pressure can help protect you from heart attack, stroke, kidney disease, eye disease, and even cognitive decline. The goal of the new guidelines is to encourage you to treat your high blood pressure seriously and to take action to bring it down, primarily using lifestyle interventions. "It is well documented that lifestyle changes can lower blood pressure as much as pills can, and sometimes even more," says Dr. Fisher.

Making those changes can be challenging. More than one woman has woken up in the morning committed to healthy eating only to be derailed by a plate of cookies on a table in the office or a dinner out with friends.

You don't have to embark on a major life overhaul to make a difference in your blood pressure. Here are six simple tips for actions you can take to help get your blood pressure back into the normal range.

By far the most effective means of reducing elevated blood pressure is to lose weight, says Fisher. And it doesn't require major weight loss to make a difference. Even losing as little as 10 pounds can lower your blood pressure.

Americans eat far too much dietary sodium, up to three times the recommended total amount, which is 1,500 milligrams (mg) daily for individuals with high blood pressure, says Dr. Fisher. It doesn't take much sodium to reach that 1,500-mg daily cap — just 3/4 of a teaspoon of salt. There's half of that amount of sodium in one Egg McMuffin breakfast sandwich. Weed out high-sodium foods by reading labels carefully. "It is very difficult to lower dietary sodium without reading labels, unless you prepare all of your own food," says Dr. Fisher. Beware in particular of what the American Heart Association has dubbed the "salty six," common foods where high amounts of sodium may be lurking:

It doesn't take much exercise to make a difference in your health. Aim for a half-hour at least five days a week. "Make sure you're doing something you love, or it won't stick," says Fisher. "For some that means dancing; for others, biking or taking brisk walks with a friend." Even everyday activities such as gardening can help.

"Add some weightlifting to your exercise regimen to help lose weight and stay fit. Women lose muscle mass steadily as we age, and weightlifting is an often-overlooked part of an exercise plan for most women," says Fisher.

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But which performance testing types should you conduct, what’s the difference between load testing and stress testing, and which test is suitable for which situation? In this blog post, we’ll cover the answers to these questions and more.

Table of Contents:

While there are those who compare all three types of testing, the more popular comparisons that testers make include:

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Let us take a closer look at the above comparisons.

Load testing is the process of checking the behavior of the system under test under the anticipated load. For example, the piece of software under test is designed to serve X users (because it is an internal product of an enterprise and there are no more employees), so it does not make sense to conduct testing under a higher load. Therefore, it is sufficient to check if the performance is good enough and matches non-functional requirements or service level agreements.

So, load testing in a nutshell consists of:

While load testing simulates real-life application load, the goal of software stress testing is to identify the saturation point and the first bottleneck of the application under test.

An ideal application behaves in the following manner:

The above points are true to a certain extent. However, at some point you will see that while you are adding more and more virtual users, the number of requests per second remains the same or even goes down due to increased response time. Bottlenecks can happen during this stage with errors and even stop serving incoming requests entirely.

Therefore, the main way to differentiate between these two types of testing is by focusing on their end goal.

To summarize, load testing and stress testing are two popular performance testing types that each focus on different application behaviors, such as a system’s general behavior under load or the upper limits of a system’s load capacity.

With the comparisons out of the way, let us explore each type of testing on its own.

Different types of performance testing provides you with different data, as we will further detail.

Before performance testing, it is important to determine your system’s business goals, so you can tell if your system behaves satisfactorily or not according to your customers’ needs.

After running performance tests, you can analyze different KPIs, such as the number of virtual users, hits per second, errors per second, response time, latency, and bytes per second (throughput), as well as the correlations between them. Through different test reports, you can identify bottlenecks, bugs, and errors, then decide what needs to be done.

Run performance tests when you want to check your website and app performance, which may extend to testing servers, databases, networks, etc. If you follow the waterfall methodology, test at least once before you release a new version of your application. If you’re shifting left and going agile, you should test continuously.

The following figure shows an example of a performance testing report on BlazeMeter. This is a good test, given the growing number of users does not affect the response time, the error rate remains low, and the hits per second are in line with the number of virtual users.

In other words, the test measures how systems handle expected load volumes. There are a few types of open-source load testing tools, JMeter being the most popular.

Load test when you want to determine whether your system can support the anticipated number of concurrent users. You can configure tests to simulate various user scenarios which can focus on different parts of your system (such as a checkout page, for example).

You can determine how the load behaves when coming from different geo-locations or how the load might build up, then level out to a sustained level.

Load tests should be performed all the time in order to ensure your system is always on point, which is why it should be integrated into your continuous integration cycles (utilizing tools such as Jenkins and Taurus.)

A stress test is a type of performance test that checks the upper limits of your system by testing it under extreme loads, a simple task with a tool like BlazeMeter. Stress tests examine how the system behaves under intense loads and how it recovers when going back to normal usage. Are the KPIs like throughput and response time the same as before spike in load? Stress tests also look for eventual denials of service, slowdowns, security issues, and data corruption.

Stress testing can be conducted through load testing tools by defining a test case with a very high number of concurrent virtual users.

Just as a stress test is a type of performance test, there are types of load tests as well. If your stress test includes a sudden, high ramp-up in the number of virtual users, it is called a Spike Test. If you stress test for a long period of time to check the system’s sustainability over time with a slow ramp-up, it’s called a Soak Test.

The following example shows how to create a traffic spike using JMeter’s “Ultimate Thread Group” component. We presume the system will be under traffic three minutes into the test. We define more threads to be added within fixed time windows using the “Initial Delay” setting.

Run stress tests against your website or app before major events, like Black Friday, ticket selling for a popular concert with high demand, or elections. We recommend stress testing every once in a while so you know your system’s endurance capabilities. This ensures you’re always prepared for unexpected traffic spikes and gives you more time and resources to fix your bottlenecks.

Another possible positive outcome of stress testing is reducing operating costs. When it comes to cloud providers, they tend to charge for CPU and RAM usage or more powerful instances that cost more. For on-premise deployments, resource-intensive applications consume more electricity and produce more heat. So, identifying bottlenecks not only improves perceived user experience but also saves money and trees.

While load testing and stress testing are two of the most popular performance testing types, they are far from the only performance testing options available.

Let us explore three other types of performance tests: soak tests, spike tests, and scalability tests.

Also known as endurance testing, capacity testing, or longevity testing, soak testing tracks how an application performs under a growing number of users or draining tasks happening over an extended period.

Soak tests are especially known for their extended duration. Once you go through a ramp-up process and reach the target load that you want to test, soak tests maintain this load for a longer timeframe, ranging from a few hours to a few days. The main goal of soak testing is to detect memory leaks.

Spike testing assesses performance by quickly increasing the number of requests up to stress levels and decreasing it again soon after. A spike test will then continue to run with additional ramp-up and ramp-down sequences in either random or constant intervals to ensure continued performance.

Spike tests are great to use for scenarios like auto-scaling, failure recovery, and peak events like Black Friday.

Scalability tests measure how an application can scale certain performance test attributes up or down. When running a scalability test based on a factor like the number of user requests, testers can determine the performance of an application when the user requests scale up or down.

The main metric is whether the scaling out is proportional to the applied load. If not, this is an indication of a performance problem, since the scalability factor should be as close to the load multiplier as possible.

Running your performance tests is an important part of the development process. Here are the different steps you should take for performance testing your application:

Decide on the metrics you want to test. For example, determine your acceptable response time or non-acceptable error rate. These KPIs should be derived based on product requirements and business needs. If you're running these tests continuously, you can use baseline tests to enforce these SLAs.

Detail which scenarios you will be testing. For example, if you have an e-commerce site, you might test the checkout flow.

There are many excellent open source solutions out there, like JMeter, Taurus, and Gatling. You can also use BlazeMeter to get additional capabilities like more geolocations, test data, and advanced reporting.

Build the script in the performance testing tool. Simulate the expected load, the capabilities you are testing, test frequency, ramp-up, and any other part of the scenario. To simplify the process, you can record the scenarios and then edit them for accuracy. If you need test data, add it to the script.

Execute the tests. This is the simple part. Usually you click “run."

Analyze the test results to identify any bottlenecks, performance issues, or other problems. You can use the dashboards provided by the performance testing tool or you can look at solutions like APMs for more information.

Fix the performance issues and retest the application until it meets the performance requirements.

Performance testing and performance engineering are related concepts but they mean different things.

Performance testing evaluates the stability, responsiveness, reliability, speed, and scalability of a system or application under varying workloads. The performance of the system or application is tested and analyzed to ensure that it meets the performance requirements.

Performance engineering, on the other hand, is a proactive approach to software development that identifies and mitigates performance issues early in the development cycle, from the design. By addressing issues earlier, engineering organizations prevent issues and accelerate time-to-market.

Performance testing is one of the steps taken when performing performance engineering.

Performance testing tools are platforms that evaluate and analyze the speed, scalability, robustness and stability of the system under tests. These solutions help ensure that applications and websites can handle the expected level of user traffic and function reliably under different loads. As a result, they are an important component of the software development lifecycle. Many such platforms can integrate with CI/CD tools, so that performance tests are run automatically as part of the integration and deployment pipelines.

One such leading performance testing tool is BlazeMeter. BlazeMeter is a continuous testing platform that enables developers and testers to test the performance of their web and mobile applications under different user loads. It provides a comprehensive range of testing capabilities, including load testing, stress testing, and endurance testing that is open-source compatible. BlazeMeter also supports functional testing and API testing, and provides capabilities like mocking and test data.

Utilize each of the performance testing types detailed in this blog to ensure you are always aware of any issues and can have a plan for dealing with them.

With BlazeMeter, teams can run their performance testing at a massive scale against all your apps, including web and mobile apps, microservices, and APIs. With advanced analytics, teams using BlazeMeter can validate their app performance at every software delivery stage.

BlazeMeter lets you simulate over two million virtual users from 56 locations across the globe (Asia Pacific, Europe, North, and South America) to execute performance tests continuously from development to production.

See for yourself how you can easily build, scale, analyze, and automate performance tests.

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