Performance Testing: is the testing, which is performed, to ascertain how the components of a system are performing, given a particular situation. This testing is the subset of performance engineering, which is focused on addressing performance issues in the design and architecture of software product.
Load Testing: is meant to test the system by constantly and steadily increasing the load on the system till the time it reaches the threshold limit. It is the simplest form of testing which employs the use of automation tools . Its also famous by the names like volume testing and endurance testing.
Stress testing: various activities to overload the existing resources with excess jobs are carried out in an attempt to break the system down. Its known as fatigue testing, this testing should capture the stability of the application by testing it beyond its bandwidth capacity.
Performance testing - It is performed to evaluate the performance of components of a particular system in a specific situation. It very wide term. It includes: Load Testing, Stress Testing, capacity testing, volume testing, endurance testing, spike testing, scalability testing and reliability testing etc.
Load Testing is subset of performance testing. It is done by constantly increasing the load on the application under test till the time it reaches the threshold limit. The main goal of load testing is to identify the upper limit of the system in terms of database, hardware and network
Stress testing - It is done to evaluate the application's behaviour beyond normal or peak load conditions. It is basically testing the functionality of the application under high loads. Normally these are related to synchronization issues, memory leaks or race conditions etc
