Performance Testing an API

APIs are meant to be interacted with programmatically. This means that access to them can be automated. This ability to automate is great and is one of the reasons that APIs have taken off the way they have. However, the ability to automate them means that they can be, deliberately or inadvertently, interacted with in ways that can cause performance issues.

Performance testing is an area of testing that has its own specialists. There are a huge number of considerations and a lot of complexity that go into performance testing. I have done some performance testing in my career and worked with performance testing teams, but I am not an expert on this topic. However, as with security testing, I believe that this topic is too important to API testing for us to ignore. We might not be able to deeply test for performance, but as well-rounded testers, we want to be able to check for some of the more obvious things.

In this chapter, we will learn about some...