Performance and Resource Considerations

SAST performance depends primarily on code base size and analysis depth. Analyzing millions of lines of code with interprocedural data flow analysis can take hours or days. This duration might exceed CI/CD pipeline timeouts, forcing organizations to run SAST asynchronously or limit analysis scope. However, once analysis completes, results are immediately available without requiring application deployment or test execution.

DAST performance varies with application size and test comprehensiveness. Crawling large applications, testing numerous parameters, and waiting for application responses can extend scan times significantly. Unlike SAST which analyzes static artifacts, DAST must interact with live systems, making it susceptible to network latency and application performance. Comprehensive DAST scans of complex applications might run for days, though focused scans complete much faster.

Resource requirements differ substantially. SAST requires computational resources for code analysis but doesn't need running applications. DAST requires fully deployed applications in test environments, including databases, external services, and realistic data. This environmental requirement can make DAST more resource-intensive overall, especially when testing requires production-like infrastructure.