Performance Testing is not Load Testing - Leandro Melendez

How Performance Testing Has Changed: Insights, Challenges, and Best Practices Over 20 Years

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"Performance testing is not the same as load testing." - Leandro Melendez

In this episode, I talk with Leandro Melendez about how performance testing changed in the last 20 years. Live at HUSTEF, we swap stories from bare metal and heavy browser scripts to APIs, cloud, and Kubernetes. Leandro draws a clear line between performance and load testing. Do not run Black Friday tests every sprint. Watch production, use canaries, and learn from real users. He pushes observability first. Build dashboards, instrument early, and think about cost.

Leandro is helping everyone to ramp up on their observability, QA and performance practices. He has over 20 years of experience in IT and over 15 in the performance testing practice where he served multiple S&P500 customers all over the USA, Mexico, Canada, Brazil, India, Austria, etc. Author of the performance testing blog Señor Performo where he curates a diverse set of learning material for performance testers and engineers together with a couple of YouTube channels in Spanish and English. As well he hosts the PerfBytes español Podcast, and is a co-host on the main PerfBytes show since 2018. He is an international public speaker participating in multiple conferences, events and webinars, with keynotes, workshops and multiple talks on his belt. And last, author of The Hitchhikers Guide To Load Testing Projects, a fun walkthrough that will guide you through the phases or levels of an IT load testing project.

Highlights:

• Performance testing isn't load testing—modern systems need observability monitoring, not sprint-by-sprint capacity tests.
• Cloud-to-cloud load testing wastes money; monitor production instead and test only for big events.
• Start with dashboards showing real-time performance metrics before writing any automated performance tests.
• Elastic cloud scaling masks poor performance—systems may respond fast but cost ten times more.
• No single best tool exists; embrace multiple platforms like choosing silverware for different foods.