Response Time Testing – What it is &  How to Measure it?

Response time should be measured in seconds, not minutes.

Every user interaction triggers an action with an expected response time. If the application takes too long to respond, there is definitely an issue that needs fixing. The longer the response time, the higher the abandonment rate. Figures show that more than half the users will leave the site if it takes more than three seconds to load (Source: Envisage Digital). Further, every one-second delay in web page response time results in 16% lower user satisfaction. Clearly, fast response time is critical, which brings us to our topic: response time testing. Let’s see how you can measure and improve the response time of your application through proper testing.

What is Response Time Testing?

Response time testing is verifying the time it takes for a software system to respond to a user’s request or input. It measures the system’s performance by assessing how quickly it delivers a response under varying loads and conditions. With this type of testing, you can readily identify bottlenecks that contribute to lower user satisfaction and higher load time. For instance, in a web application, response time testing would measure the time it takes for a webpage to load after a user clicks a link. This testing helps ensure that the system is responsive and meets performance expectations.

Why is Response Time Important?

Multiple reasons play a role in showing how important response time is; for starters, it is a highly critical metric in measuring the performance and usability of a system. And as customers expect faster and more accurate responses, another extremely important parameter to look at is user satisfaction and experience. If more and more users are happy with your system, the response time must be in milliseconds or so. So, a better response time prevents users from losing interest and moving away to a better system. All of this, in turn, contributes to achieving outlined business outcomes and goals, preferably within the time frame and budget.

How to Measure Response Time?

The response time of any application depends on its performance. Testers check response time in performance testing for the system under realistic and high load conditions to track the time difference between input and output requests. In addition, you can also determine error rate, resource consumption, throughput, and latency parameters to identify which of these add to increased response time.

Automation test tools emerge as a useful part of this process. They track the response time to its accurate value and record the time frame between user request and application response. However, it is possible for different tools to provide varying results, but an average of all these outcomes should help you measure the response time of your system.

How to Interpret Response Time?

Different applications and scenarios impact the response time interpretation. Let’s look at how:

A website with a 1.2-second load time has an excellent response time; however, the same cannot be said for an application that provides real-time financial information. Similarly, the 1.2 seconds response time for a video streaming service is vastly longer. So, you first need to clearly define the expectations to interpret response time as per the type of the system. Once it becomes understandable that various software has differing expected response times, you can easily gear the testing process in the right direction to achieve the utmost business objectives and industry standards.

How to Improve Response Time?

By simply identifying the root cause of delay and eliminating them at the earliest! Yet, the thought is far easier than it is in action. The good news is that there are multiple proven and useful methods to improve response time, starting with response time testing. Only when you check and monitor the response time can you see the reasons for a higher response for any user interaction. Some of the strategies that have always been known to prove themselves useful are tracing the factors that contribute to higher response time, debugging the issue accurately, defining the problem, and logging and monitoring the learnings in detail. All these steps help in diagnosing and optimizing the response time to the expected time frame.

How to Benchmark Response Time?

You know that the time to respond should be low, but by how much? Often, evaluating the current response time against a set benchmark helps. By following a reference point, you can measure and improve the interaction time of your application to improve customer satisfaction and industry competition. We suggest that you accumulate trusted resources to get an idea of the current industry standards for the response time. For starters, you can rely on research papers, recent statistics, customer reviews, case studies, and user feedback. Even some tools help. Two of the most popular are WebPageTest and Google’s PageSpeed Insight. 

Types of Response Metrics

Response metrics in software testing encompass various aspects of a system’s performance. Some common types of response metrics include:

• Average Response Time: The time it takes for the system to provide a response to a user’s request or action.
• Maximum Response Time: This metric represents the maximum time the system takes to respond to a user request. It helps identify the absolute worst-case scenario for response time.
• Error Rate: The frequency of errors or failed requests during testing, expressed as a percentage of the total requests.
• Peak Performance: Measuring the highest level of performance that the system can achieve under ideal conditions.
• Throughput: The number of transactions or requests the system can process in a unit of time, often measured in requests per second.
• Resource Utilization: Monitoring CPU, memory, disk, and network usage to assess how resources are consumed during testing.

Three Important Response Time Values

There are three key response time testing values that highlight the performance of a system in general:

• 0.1 second: An application responding in 0.1 seconds is considered to be ideal with the perfect response time. It shows that there are no performance issues.
• 1 second: A response time of 1 second is acceptable if it does not go beyond this time limit. Users may expect some delays but no halt or breakdown in the interaction.
• 10 seconds: It goes without saying that the response time of 10 seconds is highly unacceptable. In any case, the time limit should not exceed 10 seconds, considered to be the maximum time to respond, or users will experience interaction issues over a long period.

Response Time Testing Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages	Disadvantages
Identifies performance issues and reveals bottlenecks that could impact user experience.	Comprehensive response time testing requires substantial hardware and software resources.
Ensures that response times meet user expectations, enhancing user satisfaction.	Analyzing response time data and diagnosing issues can be intricate and time-consuming.
Provides a baseline for system performance and helps set performance standards.	Test environments may not fully replicate real-world usage, leading to inaccurate results.
Enables early detection and mitigation of performance-related problems.	Conducting comprehensive response time testing can be expensive, especially for large-scale systems.
Assesses the system’s performance under various user load levels, aiding scalability planning.	While response time testing can identify issues, it may not predict all real-world performance scenarios.
Identifies areas that need performance tuning and optimization.

Response Time Testing Tools

Several tools are available in the market that support your response time test efforts with automation. Some are no-code and low-code that are becoming popular now owing to requiring less time for test creation and execution.

• Apache JMeter: Apache JMeter is a popular open-source tool for performance and load testing. While it offers a user-friendly GUI, creating complex test scenarios often requires scripting in JMeter’s proprietary language, which is a form of coding. This allows for highly customized response time testing but demands coding skills.
• Gatling: Gatling is an open-source load testing tool that utilizes the Scala programming language for test script creation. 
• LoadNinja: LoadNinja is a cloud-based load-testing tool that offers a scriptless, codeless test creation approach. Testers can record user interactions in a browser and then use these recordings to create load tests, including response time measurements.
• NeoLoad: NeoLoad provides a no-coding approach to creating and running performance tests. Testers can design complex scenarios and measure response times without writing extensive code.
• Testsigma: Testsigma offers end-to-end automated web testing along with mobile and API testing. However, the tool can be used to measure and monitor response times for individual test cases. It assesses response times for specific functional tests as part of your overall testing strategy, all without any coding.

Schedule a demo with us to see how Testsigma can help measure response time for your application

Conclusion

Response time is a performance metric that influences user satisfaction to a high level. If your application is slow to respond, you are likely to lose a fair share of market value and customer trust instantly. Testing response time improves these factors by a tremendous amount. Your users will not shy away from coming back, which will improve your market presence.

Include response time testing as an essential step of your testing process to enhance the overall performance of the application.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an example of response time?

A typical example of response time testing is assessing the time it takes for a web application to respond to a user’s search query. For instance, when a user enters a search term and clicks “Search” on an e-commerce website, the time from the click to the display of search results is measured. If the response time falls within acceptable limits, it ensures a positive user experience.

What is the response time in performance testing?

Response time in performance testing measures how long a software system takes to respond to a user request. It assesses system performance, user experience, and compliance with performance requirements.