Identifying reasons to test the performance of an application

Performance Testing is the testing done to determine how better some aspect of the system performs under a particular workload.
Every company has different reasons for whether to include Performance Testing as a part of their QA Process or not.
The common reasons for including Performance Testing as a part of certain project are:
1. To assess the application for different Workloads
2. Find out the Throughput levels
3. To find out the Response times
4. Collect data for scalability and Capacity planning
5. To compare performance characteristics of multiple systems or system configurations
6. Evaluation against the Performance criteria
7. Calculating the efficiency of the Algorithm
8. Find out source of the Performance problems
9. To know or to perform the system tuning
10. To estimate the Hardware configuration required to support the application when you go ‘Live’.
Thus, this type of Testing is typically done in order to help identify the bottlenecks in a system, establishing a benchmark for future testing, to perform performance tuning and to collect the performance data related with to the overall quality of the system.