What is Benchmark Testing? (With Types, Benefits, Steps, and More)

As a techy, what's the first thing you would check before buying a new laptop or a PC? The specs, right? You wanna know how fast the processor is, how many gigs of RAM the latest graphics card boasts, or if performance specs are significantly better than the older generation chips.  

Just like checking the specs of a new laptop, benchmark testing helps you understand how well a software performs under various conditions. While at it, you measure key performance indicators like speed, efficiency, and stability to ensure the system can handle the expected load and provide a smooth user experience.

Benchmark testing is a way to check how well a system or part of a system works by comparing it to a standard. It helps to see if the system is fast, reliable, and stable.

Think of it like measuring your car's top speed and comparing it to others (typically made by other manufacturers) or any of the previous models of the car.

Benchmark testing can often involve running the same tests before and after system changes to see if performance has regressed (gotten worse). Based on the results, you can analyze system strengths and weaknesses.

Performance Testing evaluates how well your system works under specific workloads or usage patterns. Benchmark testing is typically considered to be a subset of performance testing and compares system performance to a known standard.

Here’s a quick overview:

Software testing methods are broadly divided into two key categories:

• Functional
• Non-functional

Benchmark testing comes under performance testing, which is a type of non-functional testing method.

Also Read: What is Functional Testing and Why It’s Important?

With benchmark tests, you can:

• Evaluate performance — measure your system performance under specific conditions. Based on test results, you can identify system bottlenecks and optimize the available resources. With these, you can ensure your product meets the required performance goals.
• Compare with industry standards — compare how your system stacks up against other market players. These insights can help make informed decisions and optimize current strategies, whether it’s for pricing, development, marketing, or other specifics.
• Track improvements — measure the impact of changes or optimizations made to your system. Running the same benchmark tests over time can help track performance improvements or regressions. This lets you plan future development and testing efforts.
• Identify improvements — identify the hardware limitations of your system. Based on test results, you can plan upgrades, make changes to the existing version, or come up with newer versions.
• Assure quality with data —  quantify your system's performance and gain insights with the gathered data. You can use this data to analyze and verify whether or not your system meets pre-defined quality assurance (QA) goals, such as speed, stability, and scalability. It helps ensure a high-quality product for the end user.

Also Read: What is an End User and How to Identify End User Types?

Here are some key components to benchmark a typical web app:

For Frontend (Client-side)

• Functions — form submissions, logins, UI element interactions.
• Performance — page load times, script execution times, rendering speed across devices.
• Compatibility — consistent behavior across different browsers and devices (e.g., desktops, mobiles, tablets).
• Usability — ease of navigation, clarity of instructions, good readability and accessibility, proper error handling.

For Backend (Server-side)

• Functions — handling API calls, data processing, business logic execution.
• Performance — response times under concurrent user requests, performance under peak traffic.
• Security — authentication mechanisms, authorization controls, data encryption.
• Scalability — server adaptation to an increased user base or data volume (e.g., horizontal scaling by adding servers, vertical scaling by upgrading resources.

For Databases

• Functions — data integrity checks, data validation, query speeds.
• Performance — query response times, and data retrieval speed for complex queries.
• Security — protection from unauthorized access (e.g., user access controls, data encryption at rest and in transit.
• Scalability — horizontal scaling by adding database instances or sharding data across multiple servers.

Benchmark testing types include running:

• System benchmarking — evaluates the entire system performance (like laptops, smartphones), with all its main components including the CPU, memory, storage, and graphics processor.
• Application benchmarking — measures app performance (like web servers, databases, frontend clients, full-stack apps) under real-world usage scenarios.
• Hardware benchmarking — evaluates the performance of specific system hardware like processors, graphics cards, RAM sticks, hard drives, and solid-state drives (SSDs).
• Network benchmarking — evaluates network-related performance like that for the local area networks (LANs) and wide-area networks (WANs).
• Industry-standard benchmarking — includes tests that are often developed, recognized, accepted, and maintained by industry organizations or consortia (e.g., SPEC) to benchmark systems.
• Synthetic benchmarking — measures specific performance characteristics of a system or component using artificial workloads or scenarios to generate performance results, such as for CPU, graphics card, storage, or network performance.

Also Read: Getting Started with Software Testing

Here are the steps to create one from scratch and the associated key components:

Steps to Creating a Test Plan from Scratch:

1. Define your goals — identify the objectives of your benchmark testing.
2. Identify the metrics — determine the specific performance metrics you want to measure.
3. Select suitable benchmark tests — choose the tests that work best with your goals.
4. Establish a baseline — run your selected benchmark tests on a reference system to establish a baseline for comparison.
5. Determine test conditions —  specify the hardware, software, and configuration for benchmark tests. This ensures consistency across multiple test runs.
6. Develop a test execution plan —  outline the steps and procedures for running the benchmark tests, including necessary setups, data gathering, and analysis.
7. Document the test plan — compile the necessary details (may contain test goals, metrics, test selection, baseline, and execution plan)  of your testing plan into an all-in-one reference document. Keeping the related RTM document handy certainly helps.

Read More: What’s a Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM) and How to Create One From Scratch?

Key Components:

• Test environment — hardware, software, and environments under which the benchmark tests are conducted, such as the server configuration, operating system, and network settings.
• Test workloads — custom workloads and scenarios to generate the performance data during the benchmark tests. These can be synthetic, system-based, industry-standard, or others.
• Performance metrics — specific indicators to quantify the system performance, such as CPU utilization, memory throughput, or app response time.
• Testing tools — software testing tools to execute the tests, collect the performance data and analyze the results.

Also Read: Software Testing Tool Types: What’s Best for You?

Here’s how to run it in six steps:

1 - Prepare the test environment

Ensure that the hardware, software, and test environment (plus configurations) conditions are correctly set.

2 - Run the tests

Execute and run the selected benchmark tests, following the procedures outlined in your test plan.

3 - Collect and analyze the data

Gather the performance metrics and other relevant data generated by the test runs.

4 - Compare the results to the baseline

Compare the results to the established baseline or reference data.

5 - Interpret the results

Analyze the results to identify performance trends, bottlenecks, or areas for improvement.

6 - Document the findings

Compile the results, analysis, report issues, and conclusions into one comprehensive report.

Let’s look at some top tools and frameworks for benchmark testing. Here you go:

Benchmark Testing Frameworks (for Software)

• Apache JMeter — Popular open-source tool for running load, performance, and benchmark testing (web, API, databases). Known for its flexibility, wide protocol support, and extensive community support.
• LoadRunner — Helps measure system performance and behavior under custom workloads.
• BlazeMeter — Offers load and performance testing capabilities. Also has reporting and analytics features. Can be integrated with JMeter.
• Gatling — Yet another popular load and performance testing framework. Offers Java, Scala, and Kotlin language-based scripting. Can be integrated with DevOps and CI/CD pipelines.

Synthetic Benchmark Tools

• SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) — Offers a range of industry-standard benchmark suites for evaluating system performance.
• Geekbench — Cross-platform and free benchmark tool that helps measure the performance of CPU, memory, and compute workloads. Widely used for running benchmark tests for laptops and handheld devices (like smartphones and tablets).
• 3DMark —  Popular benchmark to evaluate 3D graphic rendering and CPU workload capabilities of a computer.

Application Benchmark Tools

• PCMark — Helps measure the PC performance, both at system and component levels.
• SYSmark — Evaluates system performance with real-world app usage patterns.