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Load VS Stress Testing. What’s The Difference?

2021 is a highly competitive market for IT based companies. Every consumer desires a product with faster operations, better graphics and better features. To sum it all, users require a product with overall best performance. During the development stages there aren’t many options to check for the performance of the product. Although checking for the the performance of the application after the codes are development is a child’s play. Therefore, before the codebase is transferred to production phase, the performance issues are known. And load and stress testing are one of the performance testing. Here we intend to explain load testing vs stress testing and what’s the difference between them.

But first let us understand about Performance testing.

Performance Testing

Performance testing provides assurance about the speed, stability and scalability of your application. Accordingly, this testing simulates traffic on your application and observes how your application responds to it. Furthermore, it scans through the bottleneck of both code and structure of the product.

Moreover, you can make iterations before the codes ever step into production.

There are many different types of performance tests:

Load tests
Stress tests
Spike tests
Capacity tests
Soak tests
Smoke tests

Most IT firms conduct performance testing just before the production run. But its more economical and efficient to conduct the testing in early development stages.

Now let us give a brief on load testing and stress testing.

Load Testing: –

Performance testing’s most critical part is load testing. Subsequently, examination of product performance is done through load testing. So, it is done by applying specific amount of load is known as load testing. Also, the load has a measured quantity. Therefore, load is the number of users using the application at the same instance i.e., number of users.

Stress Testing: –

Stress testing is concerned with analyzing the behavior of an application by applying massive load over the application. Although, the intended load is way lesser than the applied load on the application. However, this testing is non-functional. Therefore, only when the app is functionally stable; conduction of stress tests is applicable.

Load Testing Vs Stress Testing

Load Testing	Stress Testing
Load testing is used in order to examine the performance of the application by testing networks, servers, and databases.	Stress testing is used in odder to examine the stability and response time of the application.
In load testing load limit is the threshold of a break.	In stress testing load limit is above the threshold of a break.
Load testing aids the tester to detect the bottleneck of the application. Moreover, it helps in identifying the cause of bottlenecks before the application is deployed to production phase.	Stress testing aids the tester to estimate the system capacity for load handling. Moreover, it also helps in identifying the application behavior if there is a sudden increase in the load (increase in no. of users) before the app crashes.
The load testing simulates the load on application or software of testers requirement.	The stress testing is used to figure the stability and functionality on overload of the application .
Load testing estimates the operating capacity of a system or application.	Stress testing assures the system security.
Load testing is helpful when web or client-server based applications or software are to be examined.	Stress testing suddenly increases the load on the application.
Load testing can be performed with WebLOAD, LOADRunner, LOADView and etc. load testing tools for app or software.	Stress testing can be performed using LoadRunner, Jmeter, NeoLoad etc. testing tools for app or software.
Load testing on application and software reduces the expense of failure. Moreover, it helps in analyzing the customer satisfaction rate in the market.	If the system fails during the stress testing, we can plan for recovery schemes for the application beforehand. Which in turn, helps in increasing the customer satisfaction rate in the market.

Conclusion

Load testing vs stress testing and the difference between them is now observable. Likewise, we hope that you will now plan for your product carefully and decide to take up performance testing as a top priority.

We are QualySec, India’s best QA and penetration testing firm. QualySec, provides performance testing at it’s peak quality. Therefore, QualySec sincerely believes that our clients deserve the best for themselves. So, if you provide this opportunity to us, we will deliver our best to you.

Qualysec Pentest is built by the team of experts that helped secure Mircosoft, Adobe, Facebook, and Buffer

Pabitra Kumar Sahoo

CEO and Founder

Pabitra Sahoo is a cybersecurity expert and researcher, specializing in penetration testing. He is also an excellent content creator and has published many informative content based on cybersecurity. His content has been appreciated and shared on various platforms including social media and news forums. He is also an influencer and motivator for following the latest cybersecurity practices. Currently, Pabitra is focused on enhancing and educating the security of IoT and AI/ML products and services.