Differences between Performance Testing, Load Testing and Stress Testing

Differences between Performance Testing, Load Testing and Stress Testing

In order to make sure that software works smoothly, quality assurance engineers should run several types of performance tests depending on the context of the test case. Deciding on which type of performance test to conduct depends on the suitability of the test type with the software project. To make the right decision in software testing process, it’s important to know the differences between each load testing and other types of tests.

Performance Testing

Performance testing is the process of evaluating the quality, responsiveness, stability, and scalability of your software. Before conducting a performance test, you need to determine your goals. Later you need to check how your software behaves and performs according to these goals. Your aim in doing performance testing is to find and eliminate the performance bottlenecks of the system. As a result you can detect fatal issues that might affect the usability of your software. Moreover it prevents you from having unexpected profit losses or any kind of damage to your business reputation. Load testing and stress testing are two different types of performance testing. Other types of performance testing are; volume testing, spike testing, endurance testing and scalability testing. Now we will talk about load testing and stress testing.

Load Testing

Load testing is performed by increasing the load on the system until it reaches its threshold to check what amount of load it can endure. The application under test is examined to see how it behaves under a heavy load of concurrent users that perform transactions using the software. The goal of load testing is to monitor the response time and ensure that your system can handle heavy loads.

Stress Testing

Stress testing is conducted to check the stability of your software by testing it beyond its bandwidth capacity. It examines the maximum limits of your system by pushing it beyond normal conditions and putting it under extreme loads. By doing stress testing, you can see how your software behaves when your hardware resources such as memory, CPU, etc. are not sufficient and analyze how your system recovers when returning back to normal state.

Getting yourself ready for major events such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc. is crucial to be able to respond to the high demand and secure your earnings. Therefore performing stress testing in advance is beneficial to understand your system’s capabilities. This way you can fix your bottlenecks before and be ready for unexpected traffic increases. JMeter is the most popular open-source load testing tool out of a few. To learn more about our load testing product; Loadium based on JMeter, click here.