Testing / Apache JMeter Interview questions
What is the difference between load testing, stress testing, and spike testing?
Load testing evaluates system behavior under an expected, realistic level of concurrent usage, checking whether response times and error rates stay within acceptable bounds at the volume the system is actually expected to handle in normal operation.
Stress testing pushes load progressively beyond expected levels specifically to find the system's breaking point and observe how it fails - gracefully with degraded performance, or catastrophically with crashes and cascading errors - which matters for capacity planning and understanding failure modes.
Spike testing applies a sudden, sharp burst of load (often via a very short or zero ramp-up period) to see how the system reacts to an abrupt surge, like a flash sale or a viral social media mention, which is a different concern from stress testing's gradual escalation toward a breaking point.
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