Load testing measures performance of a system undergoing a large volume of requests. Before an application is pushed to production, engineers will often load test their software to ensure it is resilient in the face of high traffic.

As web applications have changed, the requirements around load testing have changed as well. External APIs, internal undocumented APIs, and proprietary databases are black boxes that you might not be able to test reliably with unit tests or integration tests. Having an end-to-end load testing system can provide a measure of insurance against unknown unknowns before users start engaging with a production version.

Mark Gilbert works on performance engineering at Apica, and he joins the show to discuss how load testing software is built and when engineers should use it. Full disclosure: Apica is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily.

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