14.4Performance Testing Architecture Decision Matrix

Different architectures have different performance concerns. Use this matrix to select the right testing strategy:

Architecture	Key Concern	Primary Tool	Key Metric
Monolith	Thread pool exhaustion	k6 / JMeter	Concurrent connections
Microservices	Inter-service latency, cascading failures	k6 + distributed tracing	End-to-end p99 latency
Serverless	Cold starts, concurrency limits	k6 + CloudWatch	TTFB, concurrent executions
Edge/CDN	Cache hit ratio, origin load	k6 from multiple regions	Cache hit %, origin req/s
LLM-backed	Token throughput, rate limits	k6 custom metrics	TPS, TTFT, rate limit hits
Event-driven	Queue depth, consumer lag	k6 + queue metrics	Consumer lag, processing latency