Thought it would be good for me to write down my own note of definitions and its objective
Performance Test
Performance Test is used to measure the performance characteristics of your web site/system. It helps you to find out the following
- How many users can work with the site concurrently receiving the acceptable quality of service? Usually we benchmark it with Page Response Time
- How many visitors your web site can handle by day or hour?
- What response time is typical for your web site under load? This is more for baseline testing of your system performance.
Stress Test
Stress Test is performed to check the ability of your web site to respond to an excessive load. Every web site has a performance limit. However, even when that limit is reached, the web site should meet the “Correct Overload Criteria”.
- It should not crash or stop responding completely.
- The number of correct page responses per second should not decline significantly.
- It should either provide a user friendly overload message for requests that it cannot serve, or delay all responses equally.
- After a period of overload it should return to the normal operation without performance degradation
Endurance Test
Endurance Test is to check the ability of your web site/system to withstand the specified load for a long period of time. In such conditions the performance degradation can be a result of memory leaks or other server resource allocation problem. The endurance testing is usually performed for several hours. The goal is to confirm that the web site performance during different test phases does not differ significantly