%% Last Updated: - [[2021-04-01]] %% The load profile will tell you how the load is distributed over time. Since applications are used in different ways, it’s not enough to get an average hits per second over the last year and test at that level. You’ll need to understand which transactions those hits are going to. Look specifically for trends over time. Does traffic pick up in the month before the tax filing deadline? Do students access their enrolment portal just before the enrolments are finalised? Does management run a series of reports that take their toll on the server at the beginning of every month? Do employees usually navigate to the intranet page at the beginning of the day, and then again after lunch? One of the most marked examples of this is the load testing required for a sports event. One of our favourite clients at Flood, Hotstar, simulated video streaming traffic to their site in preparation for the Indian Premier League in 2018. After analysing the data they had from previous years, they decided on a load test that had this load profile:  [[Hotstar]]'s load profile for their Indian Premier League 2018 tests through Flood. Source: https://blog.hotstar.com/millons-scale-simulations-1602befe1ce5 The spikes in load correspond to the start of cricket games. This spiky profile means that they had to test at higher levels of load for a short period of time, instead of testing with a lower user count for a longer time. In this case, using the average number of users throughout the day would have drastically oversimplified things. Given that their load tests required 4 million concurrent users, that small change in the workload model could have negatively impacted their results and performance during the games in production. You can only determine what the “Peak” in traffic is for your application after you’ve seen historical data. If you’re like Hotstar and you want to test the performance on game day, don’t pick traffic from some other month where there are no games— take a look at your highest season traffic-wise and test for that. You may even want to increase those figures by 10% or so in order to leave some room for growth.