The goal of performance testing is to appraise any user experience in realistic scenarios on your target application. It will allow you to assess machine and infrastructure capability.
Performance testing, load testing, stress testing, capacity testing are all based on business requirements. It’s a professional approach to evaluating the performance of an application. It requires the simulation of real load scenarios running against your target applications or websites. So that means concurrent users.
For testing sophisticated web applications, you also need a mix of relative transactions running at correct pacings. So that’s the speed at which each of the users is running at a correctly generated load. The load must be generated conforming to a HTTP standards.
If you’re following all of those four points, then you end up with realistic load, which will then give you a fingerprint of the response time that the application will deliver. In fact it will give you the response time that you can expect and also the transaction rate that we know the application can deal with at its peak.