What is performance testing?
Performance testing measures how fast and stable a system is under expected and peak workloads.
It is an umbrella term covering load testing, stress testing, spike testing and endurance testing. The goal is to find out how response times, throughput and error rates behave as usage grows.
The most useful performance testing is continuous. Comparing every release with the previous one catches gradual slowdowns that no single release would reveal.
Example
A release-over-release performance test shows the search endpoint’s p95 latency rising from 280ms to 640ms after a new ranking feature, and the team fixes a missing index before launch.
Best practices
- Define latency and error budgets for key endpoints
- Model traffic on real usage patterns
- Compare each run with a baseline
- Test in a production-like environment
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