While many of our customers may be accustomed to how uptime/downtime monitoring works, they may not be familiar with load testing and why it’s so important. The purpose of this blog post is to provide an overview of load testing, stress testing, and look at various ways that it can be used to improve website speed and performance.
Load Testing vs Stress Testing
When trying to understand load testing, it’s important to look at its cousin—stress testing. Let’s take a closer look at definitions and see how they are similar and also how they differ.
Load testing is the process of applying a steady level of demand to a website or server to see how it performs under load. For example, if you’re a retailer who is preparing for Black Friday or Cyber Monday, you want to ensure that you website and servers can handle the increased demand that those shopping days bring.
In order to simulate the flood of users that would visit your site on these days, you’d build a load test using either a free or paid tool, run the test, and then make adjustments to your servers to plan for the increased capacity (this is sometimes called “capacity planning”). In contrast to load testing, let’s look at the definition of stress testing.
Stress testing is essentially applying a load to a website or web server, similar to load testing, but instead of measuring performance under and expected load, you’re applying load until the website or server stops functioning properly and crashes. While load testing seeks to find the performance of a website or server under expected load, stress testing seeks to find the breaking point, which is also extremely useful in capacity planning.
