What is Capacity Testing?

Capacity Test:

Capacity Testing is conducted in conjunction with capacity planning, which you use to plan for future growth, such as an increased user base or increased volume of data. For example, to accommodate future loads, you need to know how many additional resources (such as processor capacity, memory usage, disk capacity, or network bandwidth) are necessary to support future usage levels.
Capacity testing helps you to identify a scaling strategy in order to determine whether you should scale up or scale out.

Capacity Testing - TechTutorialz

Vertical Scaling:

To increase the capacity if we increase resources in same logical unit/server then it is vertical scaling. E.g. Add more CPUs in existing sever. If system is not handled by one CPU then increase the CPU to 3 or 4. Another example is server is having 8 GB RAM then scale it to 16 GB. Same applicable to storages also.

Consider you have a business website. As business grows you website gets more hits. Due to increase in hits your server performance starts degrading. To handle the load you need to scale the resources by adding CPUs(Processors),RAM, disk capacity etc. anabolic steroids order So in this case if you are using vertical scaling strategy then you need to enhance the capabilities of same server/node which will handle the load properly .Vertical scaling means boosting the power of individual server.

The example in image shows same concept. To serve more passengers instead of adding one more bus we are just increasing the capacity of same bus by adding one floor to bus to accommodate 50 passengers.

Vertical scaling is also called Scale up approach.

Horizontal Scaling:

As mentioned in above website example, when your business grows at the same time hits also grows so the responsibility of your server/node grows. So to reduce this responsibility what we can do is we can add one more server with same capacity along with existing server. Now these two servers can handle the traffic effectively. This is what called horizontal scaling. We have not changed capacity of individual server but we decreased the load on server.

Horizontal scaling means enhancing the performance of server /node by adding more instances of server to your pool of servers so that load can be spread.

Horizontal scaling means scaling out. Horizontal scalability can be achieved with the help of clustering, distributed file system, load – balancing.

To address performance issues you can use either vertical scaling or horizontal scaling or both in cloud environments.

In cloud market some auto scalable models are present which are smarter than traditional scaling models and gives best performance & no down time.