Higher Education · Software Engineering
Performance Testing
What is it
Performance testing evaluates how a system behaves under expected and extreme conditions — covering load testing (normal expected traffic), stress testing (beyond normal limits), and measuring metrics like response time, throughput, and resource usage.
Why it matters
A system that works perfectly for one user can fail completely under real-world traffic — performance testing is what catches these failures in a controlled environment before they happen in front of actual customers during a critical moment.
Exam tip
When interpreting performance test results, look at how response time changes as load increases rather than judging performance from a single data point — a system that's fast at low load but degrades sharply past a certain threshold has a real scalability problem that a single measurement would completely miss.
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