I came across the meaning of “Performance Testing” about 2 years ago, when we wanted to sell core parts of our main product as a library of components to a different software vendor. They obviously were much more experienced and professional with respect to performance testing and we had to learn the limits of our application the hard way.
Of course I would like to explore the field of Performance Testing a little bit systematic now. Today I was lucky enough to find a presentation by Goranka Bjedov (who works for Google) on performance testing.
She gives a great overview of the wide variety of tests that constitute “performance testing”. She defines some of the important terms and gave a lot of real word examples and war stories of performance testing.It also does a good job of explaining the architecture and methodology associated with the execution and reporting of stress and volume testing.
Her favorite tool for web based testing seems to be the Jakarta JMeter project (http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/). According to Goranka they have written quite a few in-house extensions at Google to JMeter to make it work for them. They always try to pass the changes back to the community to come out of the need to maintain their test code themselves.