Did you know that around 78% of organizations allocate special priority to load testing as their primary performance validation method?
However, when it comes to load testing vs stress testing, it isn’t a single choice answer since both are equally crucial for performance testing. In this blog, we’re going to take a comprehensive look at load testing vs stress testing vs performance testing in this detailed guide.
What is Performance Testing?
Performance testing is a non-functional testing type that determines how a system performs when it comes to responsiveness and stability under a particular workload. It evaluates how a software application behaves under specific workload conditions, focusing on speed, responsiveness, and stability.
Importance of Performance Testing
Performance testing is crucial to make sure that the applications under test meet stability and speed expectations under normal conditions as well as peaks. It helps in determining any performance bottlenecks in the early developmental phases to ensure a responsive and smooth user experience.
Key Types of Performance Testing
Not all tests designed for highlighting performance issues are made equal. Whether we are talking about a large data input, prolonged activity, or a sudden spike in traffic, every scenario calls for a different testing strategy, which brings us to understanding the different types of performance testing. This exercise will also help provide more clarity on the subject of load testing vs. stress testing. Let’s take a look.
Load Testing
Load testing helps in measuring system performance under stipulated user loads to identify throughput, bottlenecks, and response times as the system operates at normal levels of traffic. For instance, you could simulate more than 10,000 users trying to access an e-commerce store while a bumper sale is going on.
Stress Testing
Stress testing is designed to push a system beyond the operational capacity to check for breaking points and see its failure recovery. For instance, you could check a banking app’s behavior by simulating a high traffic surge in a stock market crash scenario.
Volume testing or Flood Testing
Flood testing or volume testing is designed to check how the system is able to handle enormous data volumes instead of just user traffic. It tests storage limits, database interactions, and data processing speed. One of the most common use cases includes uploading a large number of records to a data warehouse and measuring storage, stability, and processing time.
When Should You Use Performance Testing?
Since performance testing is crucial to validate application performance before any key milestones, here are some scenarios when you should use it:
- Before deploying a major application release to ensure adherence to performance benchmarks.
- During shift left testing to catch any bottlenecks in the early phases of the development cycle.
- After architectural or infrastructural changes to validate their impact on the stability and speed of the system.
Performance Testing: Real World Example of Netflix streaming services
Netflix is under the maximum possible pressure to maintain reliable and fast streaming services across all devices at a global scale, which is why it ensures regular performance testing checks. Performance testing helps in the optimization of video delivery and helps the application adapt to various network speeds to render smooth playback.
As a result, it increases user satisfaction and retains more subscribers, in the ever competitive entertainment market.
Read More: Types of App Performance Testing
What is Load Testing?
Load testing is a performance testing technique that checks how a system behaves under an expected load of users or transactions. It checks how a system performs under expected user loads to ensure it can handle real-world traffic without issues.
Importance of Load Testing
Load testing ensures that a system can handle a designated amount of user traffic without performance problems. It identifies the number of users the application can efficiently support, which is critical to preventing crashes or slowdowns during peak usage scenarios.
When Should You Use Load Testing?
Load testing helps ensure application performance reliability during regular and peak activity, which is why you should use it in the following scenarios:
- Test the app at a high traffic event such as product promotions or Black Friday Sales, etc.
- During scaling of an application to ensure that it can handle a higher user load.
- After important integration or major application updates to confirm whether the system is still able to handle expected loads.
Load Testing: Real World Example of Amazon Prime Day
As expected, Amazon focuses on conducting extensive load testing before crucial events such as Prime day when it’s clear that shoppers are going to flood the website and app simultaneously, millions of them!
It has to simulate transactions and expected use of traffic to confirm whether the platform is appropriately able to handle peak loads, avoiding crashing, or even slowing down.
This form of testing ensures quick loading of pages and a seamless checkout process along with dynamic scalability of the infrastructure to prevent customer frustration and revenue loss during this high stakes time frame.
What is Stress Testing?
Stress testing is a crucial performance testing technique that evaluates how a system performs beyond normal or peak load conditions to determine its breaking point. It evaluates a system’s stability by pushing it beyond normal load conditions to identify its breaking point.
These parameters are different from testing a system under varying user loads which offers more insights into the load testing vs stress testing question.
Importance of Stress Testing
Stress testing reveals system behavior under extreme conditions that go beyond its capacity under normal circumstances, identify and evaluate breaking points and systems recovery from failure. This is crucial to ensure stability and resilience under extreme pressure.
When Should You Use Stress Testing?
Stress testing ensures graceful recovery of a system from failures while uncovering its weaknesses. Here are some scenarios where you should perform stress testing:
- For evaluating system behavior under unexpected or extreme traffic.
- Before the launch of healthcare platforms, banking systems, or other critical systems that could lead to failure and be catastrophic.
- For accessing failure, resistance, error-handling, and system recovery.
Stress Testing: Real World Example of JPMorgan Chase Trading Systems
JPMorgan Chase uses stress testing to evaluate its trading platforms’ performance under near-extreme market conditions, like sudden trade volume spikes in volatile trading days.
They push the system beyond its normal operational capacity to recognize potential failure modes and possible breaking points to avoid downtime, enhance the recovery process, and strengthen system resilience. This way, they can prevent possible regulatory problems of financial losses
Source: 2024 Stress Test Scenarios
Key Comparison Breakdown: Load Testing Vs. Stress Testing Vs. Performance Testing
This table provides a detailed explanation and breakdown of load testing vs stress testing vs performance testing. Let’s check it out.
| S.No | Key Aspect | Performance Testing | Load Testing | Stress Testing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Definition | Evaluates application scalability, stability, and speed under varying conditions. | Measures the handling capabilities of the application for a variety of user loads. | Evaluates the behavior of an application under extreme conditions beyond user loads which is a key load testing and stress testing difference. |
| 2 | Goals | Assessing system performance across a wide array of load levels. | Determines how an application handles traffic. | Identifies failure recovery abilities and the breaking point of an app. |
| 3 | Area of Focus | Speed, responsiveness, scalability, and resource usage. | Throughput, stability, and response time, under normal scenarios for using an application. | Stability, error handling, and behavior that go beyond usual scenarios. |
| 4 | Normal, high, and peak load scenarios. | Level of load | Normal / expected traffic conditions instead of all kinds of conditions which is a key differentiator here to get some more clarity on load testing vs performance testing. | Spiked traffic leaning towards extreme. |
| 5 | Result | Identifying areas of optimization and bottlenecks in the performance. | Helps in carrying out resource tuning, capacity planning, etc. | Make assessments for robustness, stability, and recovery mechanisms. |
How Pcloudy Makes Performance Testing Seamless
Since system performance can make or break a business, performance testing should ideally seem like a walk in the park. Fortunately, Pcloudy is powered by smart AI agents that allow testing, monitoring, and optimization of your app’s entire digital experience, which makes it one of the most popular platforms to conduct performance testing.
With a comprehensive collection of old and new devices with different versions, Pcloudy, allows testers to start, maintain, and derive insights from performance testing sessions smoothly and seamlessly.
Some of the key features that Pcloudy offers increase the convenience for performance testing, including:
- Offers access to 60+ app performance metrics to provide a 360° view of app performance across various network environments, devices, and scenarios.
- AI-powered insights to equip teams with data-driven recommendations for immediate implementation to reduce guesswork.
- Real-time data visualization using time series graphs telling test managers to stay on top of the performance goal-fulfillment.
- Live video stream of application performance to foster an in-depth understanding of issues.
- Network and API monitoring to make a deep dive into how the app interacts with APIs, servers, and backend systems.
So, why wonder what to choose between performance testing vs load testing when Pcloudy offers a variety of features to cover every performance testing aspect?
Steps to Execute Performance Testing:
Step 1: After logging in, click the ‘MyData’ section and start uploading the app for performance testing.
Step 2: Go to ‘App Performance Testing’.
Step 3: Click on the performance testing module to run the performance tests.
Step 4: Select the application to establish the device connection. After you click on record, the app will launch.
Step 5: Perform various user actions to replicate a real world testing scenario.
Step 6: The reports section will open the performance dashboard where you can access all the details regarding how the application performs.
Performance Testing Best Practices
Every business wants impeccable testing results, but to make the most out of testing efforts, organizations have to adopt some best practices. Here’s a quick overview of what you can do to ensure a smooth execution of Performance testing.
- Grasping test objectives:
Understand test objectives including processes such as defining test goals, KPIs, test scope, requirements, and so on. It helps in establishing the appropriate baseline for stress, load, or performance testing.
- Defining performance goals:
Set crystal clear targets for acceptable error rates, load capacity, and response time based on unique business requirements. Having clarity about load testing vs stress testing is a great help to implement this particular best practice.
- Select the right tools:
When it comes to performance, load, or stress testing, it’s crucial to choose a tool that aligns with your organization’s testing objectives as well as test scenarios. Convenience and comprehensiveness is one of the key factors to take into account while selecting the appropriate performance testing tool for your application.
Wrap Up
Understanding the differences between load testing, stress testing, and performance testing is critical for building robust, user-ready applications. While performance testing provides a holistic view of the system behavior, load testing ensures it can handle expected traffic, and stress testing pushes it to its limits to reveal weaknesses.
Together, these testing methods form the foundation of a resilient software application, helping you prevent crashes, ensure scalability, and deliver seamless digital experiences. Investing in the right mix of these tests isn’t just a technical choice – it’s a business imperative.
FAQs
Do small apps need performance testing?
Yes, performance issues aren’t just a big-company problem. Even lightweight apps can slow down or crash under certain conditions, especially if you’re growing fast.
How do I know whether to run a load or stress test?
Think of load testing as your everyday health check. Does your app work under normal pressure? Stress testing is like pushing it to the edge to see what breaks and how it recovers.
What’s the risk if I skip these tests?
Skipping them is like launching a rocket without checking the fuel tank. You might get lucky, but if there is a sudden surge in the number of users or an anomaly in the data limit, things can break fast and publicly.
How often should I test?
There’s no one-size-fits-all, but a good rule is: test before major releases, after significant changes, or anytime you expect more traffic than usual. Regular testing keeps not-so-happy surprises to a minimum.
