In a technology forum, Dhruva asks, what is performance testing and what is the difference between load testing and stress testing? The following explanations should answer any questions Dhruva has about performance, load, and stress testing.

"a) Performance testing: This is a kind of testing which performed to assure how the components of the system or the applications are performing under a given specific situation. System resource usage, reliability and scalability of the product are also validated in this testing. This testing is the part of testing where performance engineering resources focused on addressing on the performance issues in the software design and architecture of the product.

b) Load Testing: Load testing is famously known as endurance testing and volume testing. This testing is mainly to test the system by steadily and constantly increasing the load on the given system or application till the time it reaches the threshold limit. For this testing, the load test tools like Load Runner, Silk Performer and etc are good and which are available in the market. The ultimate purpose of the load testing is to assign software application system with the largest job it could handle to test the endurance and monitoring and analyze the system results. In this testing the system is sometimes feed with thousands of users and sometimes with zero users as well to determine the behavior of the system in different loads.

c) Stress Testing: In stress testing, various testing activities to overload the system with the existing resources with too many jobs are performed to attempt to break the system down. Negative testing and fatigue testing will also be done in this part by removing sometime the components from the existing system and to capture the application stability by testing it with beyond its bandwidth capacity. The main purpose of stress testing is to assure the failure of the system and to know how the system recovers back. The main challenge in this area is to set up a stable environment to create and capture the scenarios repeatedly.

However, the above three types of testing’s goal is mostly similar with the slight difference in their application but they often confuse what testing is for what."

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