Know Your Breaking Point Before Your Users Find It
Load testing, stress testing, and performance baseline establishment with k6 and Locust — delivered in a 5-day sprint with actionable capacity planning.
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Performance & Load Testing is a 5-day sprint that answers the question every CTO asks before a launch: “Will our infrastructure handle it?”
Why You Need Load Testing
Performance problems are different from functional bugs. Your application works correctly — it just works slowly, or not at all, when too many people use it at the same time. These failures are:
- Invisible in development — your local environment and staging server don’t have 10,000 concurrent users
- Expensive to fix after the fact — a performance incident during a product launch or enterprise onboarding can cost you the deal
- Unpredictable without data — intuition about where bottlenecks are is wrong more often than it is right
Load testing gives you data. Specifically, it tells you three things:
- Your baseline — how your application performs under normal traffic
- Your breaking point — the exact load level where performance degrades beyond acceptable thresholds
- Your bottlenecks — which specific component (database, API, CDN, connection pool) fails first
What Gets Tested
Normal load — your application under expected daily traffic. This establishes performance baselines and identifies any issues that exist at current scale.
Peak load — your application at 3-5x normal traffic. This simulates product launches, marketing campaigns, seasonal spikes, and enterprise customer onboarding.
Stress testing — your application pushed beyond peak to find its breaking point. This reveals which component fails first and how the application behaves under failure conditions (graceful degradation vs. cascading failure).
Spike testing — sudden traffic surges that test auto-scaling, connection pooling, and caching under rapid load changes.
Actionable Capacity Planning
The sprint delivers more than test results. You get a Capacity Report that your engineering team can act on immediately:
- Bottleneck root causes — not “the database is slow” but “the
user_sessionstable full scan at line 247 ofauth.pydegrades linearly above 5,000 concurrent connections” - Optimisation recommendations — prioritised by impact and implementation effort, so your team fixes the highest-value issues first
- Infrastructure right-sizing — data-driven recommendations that can reduce your cloud spend by 30-50% by replacing over-provisioning with performance-tested capacity limits
Engagement Phases
Scenario Design & Baseline
We identify your performance-critical endpoints and user flows, define load test scenarios (normal load, peak load, stress test, spike test), and establish current performance baselines. We configure k6 or Locust with your infrastructure and set up monitoring integration.
Load Testing & Stress Testing
Systematic execution of load test scenarios — ramping from baseline traffic to peak load to stress levels. We monitor response times, error rates, throughput, CPU/memory utilisation, and database performance at each level. Bottlenecks are identified, documented, and traced to root cause.
Capacity Report & Optimisation Recommendations
Delivery of the Performance & Capacity Report — performance baselines, bottleneck analysis, capacity limits, and specific optimisation recommendations prioritised by impact. CI/CD integration for ongoing performance regression testing.
Deliverables
Before & After
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Capacity Visibility | No load testing — maximum capacity unknown | Documented breaking point with specific resource limits identified |
| Performance Regression | Performance degradation discovered by users during peak hours | CI/CD performance thresholds catch regressions before deployment |
| Infrastructure Cost | Over-provisioned to avoid outages — paying for 3x needed capacity | Right-sized infrastructure based on real capacity data — 30-50% cost reduction |
Tools We Use
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do you run the load tests from?
We run load tests from cloud infrastructure in the region closest to your users. For global applications, we run distributed load tests from multiple regions simultaneously. Tests are always run against your staging or pre-production environment — never production — unless explicitly coordinated with your infrastructure team.
How much does Performance & Load Testing cost?
Book a free discovery call to discuss your project scope and get a custom quote.
What if our infrastructure can't handle the load?
That is exactly what load testing is designed to reveal. When we find bottlenecks, we document the root cause (database queries, memory limits, connection pooling, CDN configuration, etc.) and provide specific optimisation recommendations with estimated impact. Most teams find 2-3 quick wins that dramatically improve capacity without infrastructure changes.
Can we run these load tests ourselves going forward?
Yes. We deliver all load test scripts (k6 or Locust) as code in your repository, integrated into your CI/CD pipeline with performance thresholds. Your team can run them on demand and they execute automatically on staging deployments to catch performance regressions.
Ship Quality at Speed. Remotely.
Book a free 30-minute discovery call with our QA experts. We assess your testing gaps and show you how an AI-augmented QA team can accelerate your releases.
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