What is meant by the process of conducting load testing to evaluate system performance under load?

Load testing is the process of evaluating a system’s performance under expected or peak load conditions. The goal is to determine how the system behaves with a large number of simultaneous users or requests.

Main stages:

1. Defining load scenarios — what user actions or requests will be simulated.
2. Setting up the test environment — preparing servers, databases, and load generation tools.
3. Running the test with gradually increasing load — to identify performance limits.
4. Monitoring metrics — response time, CPU usage, memory, throughput.
5. Analyzing results — identifying bottlenecks and potential issues.

Example in Python using the locust library for simple load testing:

from locust import HttpUser, task, between

class WebsiteUser(HttpUser):
    wait_time = between(1, 5)

    @task
    def index(self):
        self.client.get("/")

This script simulates users visiting the homepage of a website with a delay between requests from 1 to 5 seconds.