Load Testing APIs

Overview

Execute comprehensive load, stress, and soak tests to validate API performance, identify bottlenecks, and establish throughput baselines. Generate test scripts for k6, Artillery, or wrk that simulate realistic traffic patterns with configurable virtual user ramp-up, request distribution, and failure threshold assertions.

Prerequisites

• Load testing tool installed: k6 (recommended), Artillery, wrk, or Apache JMeter
• Target API deployed in a staging/performance environment (never load test production without safeguards)
• Monitoring stack accessible: Grafana/Prometheus, Datadog, or CloudWatch for correlating test results with server metrics
• API authentication credentials for testing (API keys, test user JWT tokens)
• Baseline performance SLOs defined (target p95 latency, max error rate, minimum throughput)

Instructions