Load testing is a generic term covering Performance Testing and Stress Testing.

Load testing is a much used industry term for the effort of performance testing. Here load means the number of users or the traffic for the system. Load testing is defined as the testing to determine whether the system is capable of handling anticipated number of users or not.

In Load Testing, the virtual users are simulated to exhibit the real user behavior as much as possible. Even the user think time such as how users will take time to think before inputting data will also be emulated. It is carried out to justify whether the system is performing well for the specified limit of load.


For example, Let us say an online-shopping application is anticipating 1000 concurrent user hits at peak period. In addition, the peak period is expected to stay for 12 hrs. Then the system is load tested with 1000 virtual users for 12 hrs. These kinds of tests are carried out in levels: first 1 user, 50 users, and 100 users, 250 users, 500 users and so on till the anticipated limit are reached. The testing effort is closed exactly for 1000 concurrent users.

The objective of load testing is to check whether the system can perform well for specified load. The system may be capable of accommodating more than 1000 concurrent users. But, validating that is not under the scope of load testing. No attempt is made to determine how many more concurrent users the system is capable of servicing.