Capacity Planning in Performance Testing

Capacity Planning is divided as - Server side and Network side.

Server Capacity Planning means to determine server hardware resources required to provide the desired levels of service for a given workload mix for the least cost.

Types Capacity Planning:

• Capacity benchmarking.
• Capacity trending.
• Capacity modeling.

Benchmarking, or load testing, is perhaps the most common, but also the most expensive. The idea is, you set up a configuration and then throw traffic at it to see how it performs. To do this right, you need access to a fully-configured version of the target system.


Linear trend analysis and statistical approaches to trending can provide quick and dirty ways to predict when you will need to do something about performance, but they don’t tell you what you should do to optimally respond.


That leaves modeling, which comes in a couple flavors: simulation and analytic modeling. Simulation modeling can be very versatile and accurate, but requires a great deal of set up effort and time. Analytic modeling is fast and is potentially very accurate as well. The beauty of modeling is that you can “test” various proposed solutions to a problem without actually implementing them. This can save a lot of time and money.