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Performance
Testing Interview
Questions

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Contents
Performance Testing Interview Questions for Freshers
1. What do you understand by Performance Testing?
2. What are the types of Performance Testing?
3. What are some of the commonly available tools for performance testing?
4. What are some of the common performance bottlenecks and how do they
impact your application?
5. What is the need for conducting performance tests?
6. What are some of the common problems that occur due to poor
performance?
7. What do you understand by performance tuning?
8. How is performance testing different from performance engineering?
9. What are the steps involved in conducting performance testing?
10. What do you understand by distributed testing?
11. What is the metric that determines the data quantity sent to the client by
the server at a specified time? How is it useful?
12. What do you mean by profiling in performance testing?
13. What is load tuning?
14. What kind of testing deals with subjecting the application to a huge
amount of data?
15. What do you know about Scalability testing?
16. Why is JMeter used for?
17. How is performance testing different from functional testing?

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Performance Testing Interview Questions for

Experienced
18. What are the differences between benchmark testing and baseline testing?
19. Why is it preferred to perform load testing in an automated format?
20. On what kind of values can we perform correlation and parameterization in
the LoadRunner tool?
21. How can we identify situations that belong to performance bottlenecks?
22. Can we perform spike testing in JMeter? If yes how?
23. What are the pre-requisites to enter and exit a performance test execution
phase?
24. How is load testing different from stress testing?
25. How is endurance testing different from spike testing?
26. What are the best ways for carrying out spike testing?
27. What do you mean by concurrent user hits in load testing?
28. Can the end-users of the application conduct performance testing?
29. What are the metrics monitored in performance testing?
30. What are the common mistakes committed during performance testing?
31. When should we conduct performance testing for any software?
32. What are some of the best tips for conducting performance testing?

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Let's get Started

Performance Testing is a process of testing applications for non-functional
requirements which helps in determining the speed, stability, responsiveness and
scalability of the application under the stipulated workload. A system’s
performance is one of the main indicators to determine how successfully it is
performing in the market. Poor performance results in a bad user experience,
leading to a bad reputation and huge losses in revenue which is why it is very
much crucial to conduct performance testing.

In this article, we will be exploring the most commonly asked performance testing
interview questions for both freshers and experienced professionals.

Performance Testing Interview Questions for Freshers

1. What do you understand by Performance Testing?

Performance Testing is a category of software testing that ensures the

application performs well under any workload. This type of testing is not done to
identify bugs in the application. Its main intention is to eliminate performance
issues and bottlenecks by measuring the performance quality attributes of the
system.

The following image represents the performance attributes of any system:

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• Speed – This determines how fast an application responds to any request.

• Scalability – This determines what is the maximum user load an
application can handle.
• Stability – This determines if an application is stable under differing loads.
• Reliability - This determines if an application is consistent under different
environmental conditions at a specific period.

2. What are the types of Performance Testing?

The different types of performance testing are:

• Load testing – This type of testing checks the ability of an application to

perform under known loads. The main goal here is to identify any
performance bottlenecks before the application goes into production.
• Stress testing – This type of testing involves testing the application’s
behaviour under extreme stress or workloads for identifying the breaking
point of an application.
• Endurance testing – This testing is done to ensure that the software can
handle the expected load for a continuous period.
• Spike testing – This testing is done to ensure that the system works well
under the sudden influence of large load spikes.
• Volume testing – This testing ensures that the system behaves well under
the influence of a large volume of data.

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The following image represents the summary of types of performance testing:

3. What are some of the commonly available tools for performance testing?

There are so many tools available for accomplishing performance testing, GUI
testing, test management, load testing, functional testing etc. Among various
tools, the following are the most commonly used tools for performance testing:

• QALoad: This tool is used to perform load tests of web applications,

databases and char-based management systems.
• LoadRunner: This tool is used to test web applications by using a wide
range of platforms and environments. This is used for getting the
performance metrics of every component to identify the bottlenecks.
• WebLOAD (Radview): This is another tool for running performance and
load tests and also comparing the test metrics.
• Silk performer: This tool is used for predicting behaviour in terms of
complexity and size of e-business before deploying the application.
• Rational performance tester (IBM): This tool was developed by IBM and is
used to perform automated performance testing of the server and web-
based applications.

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• JMeter: JMeter is a Java-based open source performance testing tool that

can be used to test both static and dynamic web applications and
resources. It is used for simulating heavy server load for testing the
strength and analyzing overall performance under varying load.
• Flood.io: This is another load testing tool that is used for executing globally
distributed tests on performance from different tools like Selenium, JMeter
etc.

4. What are some of the common performance bottlenecks and how do they
impact your application?

Bottlenecks are system obstructions that contribute to degradation in the

system’s performance. They are caused either by hardware issues or coding
errors that lead to a reduction of throughput under varying loads. Some of the
common bottlenecks in performance are:

• Processor bottlenecks: These occur when the processor is overloaded and

cannot perform its tasks and respond to requests on time. These can be in
2 forms:
o CPU running at above 80% capacity for a prolonged period.
o A long queue of requests for the processor.
Both of these forms occur when the system has insufficient memory
and has continuous interruption from the I/O devices. They can be
resolved by adding more RAM, increasing CPU power and improving
algorithmic efficiency.
• Memory Utilization: This bottleneck occurs when the system does not have
fast RAM or does not have sufficient memory. This impacts the speed of
serving information to the CPU thereby slowing down the application.
Whenever the device does not have enough RAM, the storage will be
offloaded to SSD or HDD. These issues can be resolved by increasing the
memory capacity or increasing RAM. If the RAM is very slow, then it can be
replaced. Sometimes the problem can arise due to memory leak issues
wherein a program does not release memory so that the system can use it.
Correcting the application program to free memory also can fix the issue.

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• Network bottlenecks: These occur when two or more devices lack the
necessary bandwidth to communicate with each other. Whenever there is
an overburdened server or overloaded network that causes the network to
lose its integrity. These issues can be resolved by upgrading servers,
network hardware like hubs, routers, access points etc.
• Software bottlenecks: These bottlenecks are due to the software where
programs are built for handling finite tasks so that it doesn’t utilize
additional RAM or CPU. This makes the program use only a single core or
processor despite the availability of resources. These can be resolved by
making the software program more efficient so that it can use available
resources efficiently.
• Disk Usage: The slowest component in a server is long-term storage units
like SSDs or HDDs that are unavoidable. The fastest long-term storage units
have physical limits which makes it difficult for the programmers to
troubleshoot such issues. These can be fixed by increasing RAM caching
rates, reducing fragmentation issues or by addressing insufficient
bandwidth by switching to faster storage units.

The key to fixing all the bottlenecks are by pinpointing the root cause of the
system degradation and then by fixing the code or by adding additional
hardware resources depending on the causes.

5. What is the need for conducting performance tests?

Performance testing is conducted for providing information to the stakeholders

about the speed, capability, reliability and scalability of the application. These
help in identifying what needs to be done for improving the application before it
goes to the end-users in the market.

• If the application was released to the market without conducting

performance testing, then the issues such as slowness in software,
application inconsistencies, application crash under the influence of heavy
workloads would not be detected.
• Performance testing helps to determine if the application meets the
performance requirements under varying workloads. If an application with

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poor performance attributes is launched to the market, then it can lead to

a bad reputation and loss in sales.
• Whenever we are dealing with mission-critical applications or life-saving
systems, then it is very much necessary to conduct performance testing so
that the application behaves consistently for a long period.
• Just a 5-minute downtime of Google.com in the year 2013 resulted in losses
of
• $545,000. According to LovetheSales.com, a downtime of YouTube for 37
minutes cost Google around $1.7m in losses in ad revenues in the year
2020. According to Gremlin, Amazon.com loses $13,219,128 per hour due to
downtimes. We can see the revenue impact of software downtimes on the
companies.

Hence, performance testing is very much crucial before any application is

launched to the market.

6. What are some of the common problems that occur due to poor
performance?

Following are some of the issues caused due to poor performance:

• Bottlenecking – These are obstructions that contribute to system

degradation in terms of performance. They occur when there are coding
errors or hardware issues that reduces the throughput of the application
under certain workloads.
• Poor response time – Response time refers to the time taken by the
application to respond to any request. For the best user experience, the
response times should be very fast. Poor performance of the application
leads to slower response times. If response times are slow, then the user
loses interest in our application and might turn towards the competitor’s
application.
• Long Load time – Load time refers to the initial time taken by an application
to start. This time should be as minimum as possible. Low performance
leads to increased load time.
• Poor scalability – This impacts software from handling expected user load
which makes the application unavailable to some set of users.

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7. What do you understand by performance tuning?

Performance Tuning is the process of identifying performance bottlenecks and

taking steps to eliminate them. There are two types of tuning, they are:

• Hardware tuning: This type of tuning helps in improving the system

performance by either replacing, adding or optimizing the hardware
(Processor, CPU, RAM etc) of a system to eliminate the bottlenecks caused
due to hardware.
• Software tuning: This helps identify software bottlenecks by performing
code and database profiling. Here, the software code will be modified for
resolving the bottlenecks.

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8. How is performance testing different from performance engineering?

Both of these terms are closely related yet distinct. Performance testing is a
subset of performance engineering that primarily deals with gauging the
performance of the application under varying loads.

The difference between these two are as follows:

Performance Testing Performance Engineering

This deals with designing test cases This deals with engineers taking an
and executing them for determining active part in the SDLC cycle to
the performance of an application. develop high-performance websites.
It helps in uncovering bugs and This helps developers meet the
Performance bottlenecks by providing business requirements and meet the
analysis reports to the developers to industry standards for reliability,
resolve them. scalability and speed right from the
beginning of the application
development process.
This makes use of a variety of tools Performance engineering is more of
that is only concerned if a website a culture that emphasizes more on
sustains with a given load. using best practices for ensuring that
the high-performing applications are
developed.
This can be performed using To follow best coding practices to
cloud-based tools without requiring deliver high performing apps, it is
the background of programming skills. very much essential to have good
programming knowledge.

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9. What are the steps involved in conducting performance testing?

Following are the steps involved in the Performance Testing Lifecycle:

• Requirement Analysis: The first step is to determine all the requirements

needed for testing after consulting with the clients and developers. This
helps in determining the scope and objectives of testing and helps testers
to plan out testing accordingly.
• Architecture Review: Once all the requirements are gathered and testing is
planned, we perform an architectural review of the system under test.
• Test Strategy: Once the review is done, carefully layout the strategies
required for performance testing that considers the following criteria -
o Response time of the application
o Application bottlenecks involving both software and hardware
o Optimal configuration of the system
o System capacity and scalability
o Resource utilization percentage
o Volume of data and workload capability of the application
• Test Design: Once the strategy is ready, the testers have to come up with
automation scripts or prepare the testing environment using the tools by
following all the best practices and coding standards. The testers have to
come up with various test scenarios covering both positive and negative
cases.
• Test Execution: The scripts prepared in the previous step would be
simulated and executed.
• Results Analysis: The result of test execution will be analyzed and
documented for recording purposes. These metrics will be observed and
tracked for any defects.
• Reports and Recommendations: The documented results will be presented
to the developers along with the recommended resolutions.

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10. What do you understand by distributed testing?

Distributed testing is the process of testing applications when lots of users are
gaining access to the application from different devices simultaneously. This
helps to perform stress testing.

A brief overview of the distributed testing is represented in the image below:

11. What is the metric that determines the data quantity sent to the client by the
server at a specified time? How is it useful?

Throughput is the metric that determines the data quantity sent to the client in
response to its request by the server. It is calculated in terms of requests per
second, hits per second, calls per day, etc. In most cases, it is calculated in bits
per second.

The value of throughput tells the slowness or fastness of the network and its
bandwidth capabilities. The higher the throughput, the higher is the network
capability.

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12. What do you mean by profiling in performance testing?

Profiling is the process of fine-tuning the performance testing process by helping

to identify the system components responsible for most of the issues related to its
performance.

13. What is load tuning?

Load tuning is a process of performance improvement technique by conducting

necessary modifications to the software configurations depending on the results
of load testing.

14. What kind of testing deals with subjecting the application to a huge amount
of data?

This kind of testing is known as volume testing. It deals with subjecting the
application to a huge amount of data to determine how much data the
application can handle when there are a good load of users accessing the
application concurrently. It verifies the performance of a system to test whether it
can handle a stipulated volume of data by entering huge data volume to the
application either incrementally or steadily.

15. What do you know about Scalability testing?

Scalability testing is a type of performance testing that analyzes how well the
software is capable of handling complex operational capacity from a simple
capacity. Some software takes time to adapt to complex capacities. This testing
ensures that the application can scale quickly without any glitches or drawbacks.

16. Why is JMeter used for?

JMeter is a Java-based tool for performing load testing. It helps in analyzing and
measuring the performance of web services with the use of plugins. The latest
JMeter version is 5.4.2 that requires a Java 8+ version to run.

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17. How is performance testing different from functional testing?

Performance Testing Functional Testing

Helps to validate the system behaviour Helps to verify the software accuracy
at different load conditions. with known inputs and expected
output.
This testing is preferred to be done in This testing can be done both
an automated way. manually and automatically.
Several users can perform desired Here, only one user performs the
operations. operations.
Clients, Testers, developers, DBA and Customer, Tester and Development
Network teams are involved here. teams are involved here.
This requires a test environment that is Here, we do not require that is close to
close to the production environment to the production environment for
get the best results. testing.
Non-functional requirements are Functional requirements tested here.
tested here.

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Performance Testing Interview Questions for

Experienced

18. What are the differences between benchmark testing and baseline testing?

Benchmark Testing is a testing process conducted to compare the system

framework performance against set industry standards that are laid by some
organizations.

Baseline Testing is a type of testing where the tester runs various tests to know the
information about the performance. Whenever a change is done in the future, the
result of the baseline testing will be considered as a reference point to the next set
of testing.

19. Why is it preferred to perform load testing in an automated format?

Performing load testing in a manual way has the following disadvantages:

• Accuracy cannot be predicted easily regarding the application’s

performance.
• Synchronization among various users becomes challenging to coordinate
and maintain.
• In real-time testing, it would require real users to test the application.
• Additionally, manual testing increases the cost of manual effort required.

Due to all the above-mentioned reasons, it is preferred to perform load testing in

automated form.

20. On what kind of values can we perform correlation and parameterization in

the LoadRunner tool?

Correlation is performed for dynamic values such as session ids, session states,
date values etc that are returned from the server in response to any request.

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Parameterization is conducted upon static data, such as passwords, usernames

etc that are usually entered by the user.

21. How can we identify situations that belong to performance bottlenecks?

We can identify performance bottlenecks by monitoring the applications that do

not perform well against the stipulated stress and load conditions. We can use
LoadRunner software for making use of different monitors that monitor database
servers, network delays, firewall monitors etc.

22. Can we perform spike testing in JMeter? If yes how?

Spike Testing is conducted to determine how an application behaves when the

number of users accessing the system decreases or increases abruptly. This is
because generally when the number of users varies abruptly and suddenly
(leading to a spike), then the system behaviour will have unexpected changes.
This can be tested in JMeter using Synchronizing Timer. This is simulated by
jamming the threads by synchronizing the time until the stipulated number of
threads have been blocked and once that is achieved, then release the threads
suddenly at once to simulate a large load.

The following steps can be performed:

• Create a performance test plan

• Create a thread group within it
• Add all the JMeter elements specific to business requirements
• Add listeners to view the results
• Run the tests
• Get the results
• Monitor the behaviour.

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23. What are the pre-requisites to enter and exit a performance test execution
phase?

The necessary entry criteria for the execution phase:

• Completed automated scripts

• The test environment should be ready
• Finalized Non-functional requirements (NFR)
• The latest functionally tested code should be deployed
• The test input data should be ready.

The necessary exit criteria would be:

• Test cases should cover and meet all the NFRs

• No more performance bottlenecks are present
• All defects are finalized
• The behaviour of the application should be consistent and acceptable in
heavy and spiked loads.
• Final reports are submitted and shared.

24. How is load testing different from stress testing?

• Load testing is a type of testing that analyzes the software performance

when it is saddled with more than normal workloads. The load can be of
any kind - data or users accessing the system or the application itself on
the server’s operating system. When the load is increased, some
applications tend to perform slowly (degenerate) and in some other cases,
the applications run normally. Load testing determines that the
applications run at optimal levels irrespective of the load given to them.
• Stress testing on the other hand has a broader approach to the software’s
performance. It considers the amount of data processed, time taken to
process it, network connectivity levels and other applications running in the
background. When the stress levels are high, software tends to crash or
stop working altogether. This testing imitates the stressful environment to
test the resistance of the software to operate correctly.

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25. How is endurance testing different from spike testing?

• Endurance testing deals with how long the application can endure and
perform well irrespective of the loads. Sometimes when an application is
used for a long time, it becomes slow or inactive which is why it becomes
important to conduct this testing. Endurance testing analyses all changes
in the application by simulating lengthy application usage. For example,
endurance testing is conducted on a Banking application where we test if it
can perform normally under continuous load or large transactions for a
long time.
• Spike testing deals with pushing the application to the limits by subjecting
the software to the highest operation level for identifying the strengths and
weaknesses of the application. Spike testing is necessary for instances
when eCommerce or shopping sites launch flash sales or holiday discount
deals where suddenly a large number of users will be accessing the
application. If the application crashes under sudden spike every time, then
it would result in a bad user experience and the users would lose faith in
the application.

26. What are the best ways for carrying out spike testing?

Spike testing can be carried out by bombarding the application with networking,
random connections, data, different operations, firing requests to every single
functionality of the application. In this way, the application is pushed to the limits
and monitoring can be done to identify if it can work under pressure. The data
monitored can be documented and then be analyzed.

27. What do you mean by concurrent user hits in load testing?

Concurrent user hits scenarios arise when more than one user will be hitting or
requesting for the same event during the load testing process. This scenario is
tested to ensure that multiple users can access the same event requests at the
same time in the application.

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28. Can the end-users of the application conduct performance testing?

No, end-users cannot conduct performance testing. However, while making use of
the software the end-users can discover software bottlenecks. However, that
cannot be equated to actual performance testing performed by professional
testers. If the end-users want to participate in testing, they can be
accommodated in the User Acceptance Testing phase.

29. What are the metrics monitored in performance testing?

Following are the metrics monitored in performance testing:

Metrics Description
Processor utilization Time spent by the processor to
execute non- idle threads.
Memory usage Amount of physical memory available
so that the server can process.
Disk time Time taken by the disk to execute
read/write request.
Bandwidth Represented in bits per second (bps)
used by network interfaces.
CPU interrupts per second Average number of hardware
interrupts received and processed by
the processor each second.
Response time Time taken to get the first character of
the response from the server to the
client.
Throughput Rate at which the server or network
receives requests per second.
Amount of connection pooling Number of user requests met by
pooled connections. The higher the
number, the better is the performance.
Maximum active sessions Maximum sessions which are active at
once.
Hits per second Number of hits every second
Thread Counts Number of threads running actively

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30. What are the common mistakes committed during performance testing?

Following are some of the mistakes committed during performance testing:

• Unknown or unclear non-functional requirements provided by the business.

• Unclear workload details
• Directly jumping to multi-user tests
• Running test cases for a small duration
• Confusion on an approximation of the concurrent users
• Difference between the test and production environments
• Network bandwidth not stimulated properly
• No clear base-lining of the system configurations.

31. When should we conduct performance testing for any software?

Performance testing is done for measuring the performance of any action in the
application. We can run performance tests for checking the performance of the
websites and apps. In case we are following waterfall methodology, we can test
every time we release a new software’s version. If we are using agile
methodology, then we need to test continuously.

32. What are some of the best tips for conducting performance testing?

Following are some of the best tips for conducting performance testing:

• The test environment should mirror the production ecosystem as much as

possible. If there are any deviations, then the test results might not be
accurate and might cause problems when the application goes live.
• It is preferred to have a separate environment dedicated to performance
testing.
• The tools selected for testing should automate our test plan in the best
possible way.
• Performance tests should be run several times for obtaining a consistent
accurate measure of the performance.
• The performance test environment should not be modified in between the
testing process.

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Conclusion
Performance testing provides in-depth insights regarding the non-functional
application requirements like scalability, speed, availability and reliability of the
software under test. These help in identifying and resolving the shortcomings and
gaps in performance before the application goes live.

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