# Hook Have you ever done load testing on an application in a test environment without finding many performance issues and then been surprised when it failed in production? I have! There are many causes for that, but I want to talk about one common cause in particular: lack of realism in load testing scripts. # Structure - The goal of a load test is to mimic production scenarios. If it doesn't adequately do so, then all bets are off and load testing results won't be accurate. - Considerations for making a script more realistic - Add static resources/embedded resources - Use concurrent requests to more closely mimic the behaviour of browsers - Verify cache and cookie behaviour of the script and of the servers: are they the same as in prod? - Dynamic think time and pacing - Using dynamic test data - Spend time on workload modelling - Consider adding different types of testing - Front-end performance - Accessibility - Chaos engineering - Reliability testing - Outro - We don't have to _exactly_ replicate production, but if your load testing results and your application's performance in production aren't lining up, I hope I've given you good places to start. Till next time!