Performance Testing Types

Actually speaking performance testing is just a concept and there is no testing called performance testing

Performance Testing for definition sake we can define as "The process of evaluating the application behavior under a various load" is known as performance testing.

Application behavior can be any of the following things

Response Time in seconds
Throughput in bytes
Transactions per seconds etc

Under performance testing following are the types of  testing types conducted to evaluate the performance of the application.

1.Load Testing
2.Stress Testing
3.Volume Testing
4.Stability Testing
5.Reliability Testing
6.Spike Testing
7.Soak Testing

Load Testing : Analyzing and studying the behavior of the application with defined load is nothing but Load Testing.
Here Load is nothing but either "number of users" or "amount of data transfer".
The purpose of load testing is to determine whether my application works fine with the present fixed load.

Stress Testing : Analyzing and studying the behavior of the application with load behind the defined load is nothing but stress testing.
The purpose of load testing is to determine whether my application works fine with the future increased load as per business growth.

Volume Testing:Analyzing and studying the behavior of the application by pumping large volume of data is nothing but volume testing.
This testing is done normally for data repository kind of application.