What is the difference between load testing and stress testing?

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Ensuring the stability and reliability of information systems is becoming an increasingly important task due to the constant growth of competition and technological development. Performance testing as a way to evaluate the stability and efficiency of an IT product plays a key role here. Today, four subtypes of such tests are distinguished: load testing, stress testing, configuration testing, and stability testing. The first two are often confused, since they both aim to determine whether the information and computing system (ICS) can handle the load.
In this article, we'll look at the differences between load and stress testing and explain when to choose each.

What is load testing
Load testing is a test of the system's performance level under a real or simulated load of the expected volume. That is, such an analysis is aimed at assessing its behavior under predetermined normal and peak loads. Simply put, a load test shows whether a software product meets the non-functional requirements imposed on it: whether it copes with the volume of work for which it is designed; if it copes, then how effectively; if not, then why.

What is load testing?Image by vectorjuice on Freepik.
A load test analyzes how a system handles increased load and how quickly and efficiently mexico whatsapp number database it processes requests within predetermined parameters. This load can be expressed, for example, as the expected number of users simultaneously performing a certain number of transactions during a given period of time. The main goal of load testing is to obtain information about the response time of the most important business transactions.

Key differences in load testing
Since load testing is just one type of performance testing, it is important to understand how it differs from the other three. Load tests are the simplest form of performance testing: they evaluate how an application operates under expected load; how it behaves within the normal range — the values ​​it should withstand. Load tests analyze system response speed, throughput, and utilization of server computing resources (CPU, RAM, network). Determining maximum performance (maxperf), when the system operates quickly and smoothly, and peak performance (peakperf), when the system starts to degrade, are also the goals of load testing. They often help identify bottlenecks in the ISS, which can then be optimized to improve overall performance.

So, the main feature of load testing is the expected amount of load that the product being tested is subjected to.

What is stress testing
Stress testing is a method of non-functional software testing aimed at checking the stability and reliability of a system under conditions that go beyond normal operation. Stress tests help to see how an application will behave under overload or external influences: for example, when a database is full, equipment failure or an attack by intruders. In this case, the goal is to find the limits of the system's operability, and in addition, tasks are solved to assess its stability, availability and quality of exception handling under extreme load. A stress test also evaluates how the system copes with the failure of individual components and whether it is possible to restore their full operation after an overload.