Load testing

Load testing is the process of putting demand on a software system or computing device and measuring its response. Load testing is performed to determine a system's behavior under both normal and anticipated peak load conditions. It helps to identify the maximum operating capacity of an application as well as any bottlenecks and determine which element is causing degradation. When the load placed on the system is raised beyond normal usage patterns to test the system's response at unusually high or peak loads, it is known as stress testing. The load is usually so great that error conditions are the expected result, but there is no clear boundary when an activity ceases to be a load test and becomes a stress test.

The term "load testing" is often used synonymously with concurrency testing, software performance testing, reliability testing, and volume testing. All of these are types of non-functional testing that are part of functionality testing used to validate suitability for use of any given software.

The term load testing is used in different ways in the professional software testing community. Load testing generally refers to the practice of modeling the expected usage of a software program by simulating multiple users accessing the program concurrently. As such, this testing is most relevant for multi-user systems; often one built using a client/server model, such as web servers. However, other types of software systems can also be load tested. For example, a word processor or graphics editor can be forced to read an extremely large document; or a financial package can be forced to generate a report based on several years' worth of data. The most accurate load testing simulates actual use, as opposed to testing using theoretical or analytical modeling.

Load testing lets you measure your website's QOS performance based on actual customer behavior. Nearly all the load testing tools and frame-works follow the classical load testing paradigm: when customers visit your web site, a script recorder records the communication and then creates related interaction scripts. A load generator tries to replay the recorded scripts, which could possibly be modified with different test parameters before replay. In the replay procedure, both the hardware and software statistics will be monitored and collected by the conductor, these statistics include the CPU, memory, disk IO of the physical servers and the response time, throughput of the System Under Test (short as SUT), etc. And at last, all these statistics will be analyzed and a load testing report will be generated.

...
Wikipedia