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1.1 What is Load Testing? Load testing is different than other forms of testing like performance or stress testing. In typical testing cycles, we will perform performance testing to create baselines and make sure that the application can function as needed for the user base. For example, with a web application a performance test might look at response times as well as number of concurrent users. With performance testing, we are looking for obvious bottlenecks (network, database, application) and tuning against those as well as creating baselines for application performance. Stress testing is taking a system or application beyond its known capacity and testing failure as well as testing how the system responds from environmental strain (dropped resources / power / cluster members). In these tests, we are looking for graceful failure as well as recoverability. With a web application for example, a stress test might include doubling the reasonable expected concurrent users against the application or even pulling access to the database. Load testing focuses on putting a large volume of work against the system / application over an extended time to uncover any potential problems with memory leaks, buffer overflows, or even possible concurrency locks. The goal of load testing is to ensure that the baselines established during performance testing are adhered to under an acceptable load over an acceptable duration. With a web application, an example of a load test would be simulating 1000 concurrent users (assuming that is expected load) all going through different scenarios through our web application for a few hours.