Benchmarking

“Benchmarking” is the practice of evaluating your system’s performance against a baseline that you have created internally (or) against an industry standard certification by some other group/organization.

In the case of a Web application, you would run a set of tests that follow with the specifications of an industry benchmark in order to capture the performance metrics necessary to determine your application’s benchmark score.

You can then compare your application against other systems (or) applications that also calculated their score for the same benchmark. You may choose to tune your application performance to attain (or) surpass a certain benchmark hits.

Some considerations about benchmarking include:
• You need to play by the protocol. A benchmark is achieved by working with industry terms to meet such standards. Benchmarking involves identifying all of the necessary components that will run together, the market where the product exists and the specific metrics to be considered.

• Because you play by the rules, you can be clear. Benchmarking outcome can be available to the outside world. Since comparisons may be produced by your competitors, you will be using a strict set of standard approaches for testing and data to ensure reliable results.

• You reveal results across various metrics. Performance metrics may involve load time, number of transactions processed per unit of time, Web pages accessed per unit of time, CPU usage, memory usage, searches, and so on.