Once you've defined you scenario, it's important to spend time determining your main objectives and goals.

Typical goals of performance testing, for both web and mobile applications, can include:

1. Checking for failures or errors that occur in an application due to high load.
   • High load may culminate in transaction failures or errors, resulting in problems within an application (like a HTTP 500 error).
   • Measure high response times and latency issues that arise due to load.
2. Determining the user limit for the application.
   • The user limit is the maximum number of simultaneous users that the application can support while remaining stable and providing reasonable response times to users as they navigate an application.
   • The user limit should always be higher than the required number of concurrent users that the application must support while deployed.
3. Determining client-side degradation and end user experience under load. Ask yourself:
   • Can your users get to the application in a timely manner?
   • Are your users able to use the application as intended within an acceptable time?
   • How does the time of day, number of concurrent users, transactions and usage affect the performance of the application?
   • Is the degradation "graceful?" Under heavy loading conditions, does the application behave as expected or do components crash and/or send erroneous/incomplete pages to the client?
   • What is the failure rate that your users observe? Is it within acceptable limits? Under heavy loading conditions do most users continue to complete their business transactions or do a large number of users receive error messages?
4. Determining server-side robustness and degradation. Ask yourself:
   • Does the web server crash under a heavy load? High user load may initiate a large number of processes in the server and create high CPU & RAM consumption. Would an increase beyond a specific point bring down the server?
   • Does the application server crash under a heavy load?
   • Do any of the other middle-tier servers crash or slow down under a heavy load?
   • Does the database server crash under a heavy load?
   • Does the system load require balancing or, if a load balancing system is in place, is it functioning as intended? In a scenario where multiple servers are in use, is the load distributed across them efficiently so that parallel processing occurs correctly? Or, are particular servers in the balancing cluster subjected to a heavy load?
   • Can the current architecture be fine-tuned to extract better performance?
   • Should you make hardware changes for improved performance?
   • Are there any specific changes in the application or its architecture that could further improve performance?
   • Are there any resource deadlocks in the application system?

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