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Question 1

Score: 0/0

Which performance test type validates the system under expected production load?

Stress testing

Load testing

Spike testing

Endurance testing

to track

2026 Statistics

Key Facts: ISTQB CT-PT Exam

Exam Questions

ISTQB

26/40

Passing Score

65%

60 min

Exam Duration

75 min non-native

$200-$249

Exam Fee

ISTQB Specialist

Lifetime

Cert Valid

No renewal

CTFL

Prerequisite

Foundation Level required

The ISTQB CT-PT v1.0 exam has 40 multiple-choice questions in 60 minutes (75 min for non-native English speakers) with a 65% passing score (26/40). Major chapters: Basic Concepts of Performance Testing, Performance Measurements, Performance Testing Activities, Tools, and Communication of Results. Covers load/stress/spike/endurance testing, JMeter/Gatling/k6, USE/RED methods, Apdex, SLOs, and Little's Law. Exam fee is $200-$249 USD. Requires CTFL Foundation. Lifetime validity.

Sample ISTQB CT-PT Practice Questions

Try these sample questions to test your ISTQB CT-PT exam readiness. Each question includes a detailed explanation. Start the interactive quiz above for the full 100+ question experience with AI tutoring.

1Which performance test type validates the system under expected production load?

A.Stress testing

B.Load testing

C.Spike testing

D.Endurance testing

Explanation: Load testing evaluates system behavior at expected/production load to confirm response time, throughput, and resource utilization meet targets. Stress testing pushes beyond capacity to find the breaking point. Spike testing applies sudden bursts. Endurance (soak) testing runs at normal load for an extended period to detect leaks and degradation.

2Which performance test type increases load beyond expected capacity to identify the breaking point?

A.Load testing

B.Stress testing

C.Smoke testing

D.Compatibility testing

Explanation: Stress testing intentionally pushes the system past its expected capacity to find the breaking point and observe failure modes (graceful degradation vs catastrophic failure, recovery behavior). Load testing stays at expected demand. Smoke and compatibility testing are not performance test types.

3Which test type applies sudden, brief bursts of load?

A.Endurance

B.Spike

C.Volume

D.Configuration

Explanation: Spike testing applies sudden, brief surges of load to verify the system can absorb traffic spikes and recover. Endurance/soak testing runs at normal load for hours/days. Volume testing focuses on large data sets. Configuration testing varies system configuration parameters.

4Which performance test verifies the system can sustain expected load over a long period?

A.Spike

B.Endurance / soak

C.Capacity

D.Baseline

Explanation: Endurance (soak) testing runs the system at expected load for an extended duration (hours to days) to detect memory leaks, resource exhaustion, slow degradation, and cumulative effects that short tests miss. Capacity testing finds the maximum acceptable load. Baseline testing establishes a reference point for comparison.

5Which is the primary KPI when measuring user-perceived speed?

A.Throughput

B.Response time

C.Disk I/O

D.Number of threads

Explanation: Response time — the time between request and complete response — is the primary user-perceived KPI. Throughput measures how many transactions per second the system handles. Disk I/O and thread count are infrastructure metrics, not user-facing KPIs.

6Which is the BEST definition of throughput in performance testing?

A.The maximum response time

B.The number of transactions or requests processed per unit time

C.The percentage of CPU used

D.The total memory consumed

Explanation: Throughput measures the rate at which the system processes requests — typically transactions per second (TPS), requests per second (RPS), or messages per second. It is distinct from response time (time per request) and resource utilization (CPU, memory). Both throughput and response time should be reported together.

7Why are percentile response times (p95, p99) usually preferred over averages?

A.Averages are harder to compute

B.Averages can hide tail latencies that affect a real fraction of users

C.Percentiles take less memory

D.Percentiles always equal the median

Explanation: A small slow tail can ruin user experience for many users while leaving the average looking good. Reporting p95 (the value below which 95% of requests fall) and p99 surfaces the user experience for the slow minority. Pairing average with percentiles gives a complete picture.

8Apdex defines satisfied/tolerable/frustrated using a threshold T. A request that takes between T and 4T is classified as:

A.Satisfied

B.Tolerable

C.Frustrated

D.Excellent

Explanation: In Apdex, requests faster than T are 'satisfied'. Requests between T and 4T are 'tolerable'. Requests slower than 4T are 'frustrated'. The Apdex score = (satisfied + tolerable/2) / total, ranging from 0 to 1. Choosing T involves business judgment about what users expect.

9With T=1 second, given 100 requests: 70 below 1s, 20 between 1s and 4s, 10 above 4s, what is the Apdex score?

A.0.70

B.0.80

C.0.85

D.0.90

Explanation: Apdex = (satisfied + tolerable/2) / total = (70 + 20/2) / 100 = (70 + 10) / 100 = 80/100 = 0.80. Frustrated (10) contributes 0. Apdex provides a single 0-1 number that balances satisfied vs tolerable behavior with respect to threshold T.

10In SRE practice, what does an SLO represent?

A.A binding contract with penalties

B.An internal target for an SLI that triggers alerts and decisions

C.A government regulation

D.A piece of hardware

Explanation: An SLO (Service Level Objective) is an internal target for a Service Level Indicator (SLI) — for example, 'p99 < 200 ms over 30 days'. SLAs are external contracts (often less strict than SLOs). Error budgets quantify how much SLO breach is acceptable before halting feature work.

About the ISTQB CT-PT Exam

The ISTQB Certified Tester Performance Testing (CT-PT v1.0) is an ISTQB Specialist certification covering technical, methodological, and organizational aspects of performance testing. The syllabus addresses performance test types (load, stress, spike, endurance, capacity), KPIs and SLOs, the performance test process, workload modeling (Little's Law), tool support (JMeter, Gatling, k6, LoadRunner, NeoLoad), bottleneck analysis (USE/RED methods), profiling, and root-cause investigation. Requires CTFL Foundation as prerequisite.

Questions

40 scored questions

Time Limit

60 minutes

Passing Score

65% (26/40)

Exam Fee

$200-$249 USD (ISTQB / Pearson VUE)

ISTQB CT-PT Exam Content Outline

10%

Basic Concepts of Performance Testing

Performance testing principles, performance test types (load, stress, spike, endurance/soak, capacity, scalability, volume, configuration, baseline), risks addressed by performance testing

20%

Performance Measurements

KPIs — response time, throughput (TPS/RPS), latency, concurrency, error rate, resource utilization (CPU, memory, disk I/O, network); Apdex (T threshold, satisfied/tolerable/frustrated); SLI/SLO/SLA, error budgets; statistical analysis of results

25%

Performance Testing Activities

Test process (analyze, design, implement, execute, evaluate); workload modeling (Little's Law L=λW, arrival rates, think time, pacing, transaction mix); test environment considerations; correlation and parameterization (sessions, tokens, dynamic data)

20%

Tools

Open source — JMeter (thread groups, samplers, listeners, distributed testing), Gatling (Scala DSL, simulations), Locust (Python, master/worker), k6 (JavaScript, scenarios, thresholds); commercial — LoadRunner (VuGen, Controller, Analysis), NeoLoad, BlazeMeter; APM — Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Grafana, OpenTelemetry

15%

Bottleneck and Root-Cause Analysis

USE Method (Utilization, Saturation, Errors per resource); RED Method (Rate, Errors, Duration); profiling (CPU, memory, async-profiler, perf, eBPF, Java FlightRecorder, dotnet-trace); database tuning (EXPLAIN plans, indexes); thread/heap dumps, GC analysis, JVM tuning, connection pool tuning

10%

Communication of Results and Modern Considerations

Reporting, percentile vs average reporting, Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS), RUM vs synthetic monitoring, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, gRPC, cloud auto-scaling, CDN caching, serverless cold starts

How to Pass the ISTQB CT-PT Exam

What You Need to Know

Passing score: 65% (26/40)
Exam length: 40 questions
Time limit: 60 minutes
Exam fee: $200-$249 USD

Keys to Passing

Complete 500+ practice questions
Score 80%+ consistently before scheduling
Focus on highest-weighted sections
Use our AI tutor for tough concepts

ISTQB CT-PT Study Tips from Top Performers

1Memorize Little's Law (L = λW) and practice solving for each variable given the other two

2Know Apdex math: T threshold, satisfied (≤T), tolerable (T to 4T), frustrated (>4T), and the formula

3Understand the difference between average, median, and percentile (p95, p99) — and why percentiles matter

4Know SLI vs SLO vs SLA and how an error budget is calculated

5Practice distinguishing load vs stress vs spike vs endurance vs capacity testing

6Understand correlation/parameterization — sessions, CSRF tokens, dynamic IDs

7Study the USE method (resources) vs RED method (services) — easy to confuse on the exam

8Know which tool fits which job: JMeter for HTTP/JDBC, Gatling for high concurrency, k6 for CI/CD, LoadRunner for enterprise

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISTQB CT-PT exam?

The ISTQB Certified Tester Performance Testing (CT-PT v1.0) is a Specialist-level ISTQB exam covering technical, methodological, and organizational aspects of performance testing. The syllabus addresses load, stress, spike, and endurance testing, the performance test process, workload modeling, tools like JMeter and Gatling, bottleneck analysis, and APM. CTFL Foundation is a prerequisite.

What are the main performance test types tested on CT-PT?

The syllabus distinguishes load testing (expected demand), stress testing (beyond capacity to find breaking point), spike testing (sudden bursts), endurance/soak testing (sustained load to find leaks), capacity testing (max load with acceptable response), scalability testing (vertical/horizontal), volume testing (large data sets), and configuration and baseline testing. Knowing when each applies is K2/K3 territory on the exam.

What is Little's Law and why does CT-PT test it?

Little's Law states L = λW, where L is the average number of items in a system, λ is arrival rate, and W is average time in the system. In performance testing, it relates concurrent users (L), throughput (λ), and response time including think time (W). It is fundamental for workload modeling — for example, calculating how many virtual users are needed to drive a target throughput given an expected response time.

What is Apdex?

Apdex (Application Performance Index) is a normalized 0-1 score based on a target response time T. Requests faster than T are 'satisfied', between T and 4T are 'tolerable', slower than 4T are 'frustrated'. Apdex = (satisfied + tolerable/2) / total. CT-PT requires understanding the math, the meaning of T, and how Apdex relates to SLOs.

What is the difference between the USE and RED methods?

Both are bottleneck/observability frameworks. USE (Utilization, Saturation, Errors) — proposed by Brendan Gregg — applies to physical resources (CPU, memory, disk, network) and is used for systems performance analysis. RED (Rate, Errors, Duration) — proposed by Tom Wilkie — applies to request-driven services and is used for application/service monitoring. USE answers 'is the resource maxed out?'; RED answers 'is the service healthy?'.

Which tools does CT-PT cover?

Open-source: JMeter (thread groups, samplers, distributed testing, plugins), Gatling (Scala DSL, scenarios, simulations), Locust (Python, master/worker), k6 (JavaScript, scenarios, thresholds). Commercial: LoadRunner (VuGen, Controller, Analysis), NeoLoad, BlazeMeter. APM: Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Grafana, OpenTelemetry. The exam tests selecting the right tool category and recognizing capabilities, not deep tool syntax.

How long should I study for CT-PT?

Plan 30-50 hours over 4-6 weeks for an experienced functional tester new to performance work, or 20-30 hours if you already do load testing. Read the CT-PT v1.0 syllabus, work through the official sample exam, complete 100+ practice questions, and aim for 80%+ before booking. Hands-on practice with JMeter or k6 against a sample app reinforces the concepts.