When evaluating the performance of products, it is important to perform
these tests under realistic conditions. This is important since it allows
us the understand the performance characteristics of the system in
production environments.

The think time plays an important role when doing performance tests. It is
defined as the time between the completion of one request and the start of
the next request. When generating requests (using load testing tools such
as JMeter), we do not normally add a think time. This, however, may not
represent the users’ real behaviour (access patterns) in the system. For
example, when accessing a web site the users typically wait between page
requests.


Therefore, including a think time in the performance test makes the
performance test more realistic as it represent users actual behaviour in
the system (more closely).

In most of the scenarios, the think time cannot be represented using a constant
value and it is a random value which is distributed according a probability
distribution function such as exponential distribution.

The load on the system is determined by the number of requests being
processed by the server. The number of active requests processed by the
server will depend on both the number of concurrent users accessing the
system and the think time.

Under a given system load, an increase in the think time will result in the
number of requests processed by the server to decrease and as a result the
number of concurrent users the system can support will increase.

We have done some performance tests on WSO2 APIM (under different number of
concurrent users and different think times) and the analysis of these
results can be found in [1].


[1]
https://medium.com/@malith.jayasinghe/performance-testing-with-a-think-time-64b6b737e3f9#.aoxvs87er



-- 
Malith Jayasinghe


WSO2, Inc. (http://wso2.com)
Email   : [email protected]
Mobile : 0770704040
Lean . Enterprise . Middleware
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