What is performance testing?

Performance testing is used to determine the response time/latency, throughput, resource utilization (CPU, RAM, network I/O, disk I/O) and workload of a software application. The main goal of performance testing is to identify how well your application performs in relation to your performance objectives. The intent of the performance testing is not to break the application under test. The intent is to observe and document performance under expected usage conditions. There are performance test available to help simulate load, for example Apache JMeter, WebLOAD, LoadRunner and so on. Using test automation tools Load Test Engineer can simulate load in terms of users, connections, data, and in any other ways.