Throughput - Unit of work per unit time

Any system has a max throughput value for a particular parameter which can be achieved (more like a fixed upper bound). Let's take an simple example of pizza delivery capacity .If a pizza store can produce 30 pizza per hour, it means that when

When there are two customers/hour , pizza store serves 2 pizza/hour => Throughput = 2 When there are 10 customers/hour , pizza store serves 10 pizza/hour => Throughput = 10 When there are 29 customers/hour, pizza store serves 29 pizza/hour => Throughput = 29 When there are 30 customers/hour , pizza store serves 30 pizza/hour => Throughput = 30 When there are 31 customers/hour , pizza store serves 30 pizza/hour => Throughput =31 (One of the customers will have to be in queue)

When there are 40 customers/hour, pizza store serves 30 pizza/hour => Throughput = 30 (Now 10 customers will have to be in queue) The above example implies that Throughput gradually increases as the number of customers increases, then it has to flatten it some point and stay there. If Pizza store is incapable of serving 30 pizza/hour when lot of customers are waiting outside the shop it means there is some problem. Similarly we expect server to be capable of providing some sort of service at a certain rate no matter how many requests are in queue. We should never see a sharp drop in Throughput. All in all , if your graph looks like the one in green , then it's a good to go... This is what you should finally achieve w.r.t Throughput of whatever parameter we are concerned with during Performance Testing

Vijendra Aithal is QA Lead for Automation at Compassites. He has about 9 years of experience in field the of software testing during which he has designed test automation frameworks using various opens source and proprietary tools on functional and performance aspects of a projects. Apart from QA, his interests lie in Business Analysis. Prior to joining Compassites, he had worked for Atlas Systems, Nuware,TCG Software Services & TCG Ivega Information Pvt Ltd.