Performance Testing RAG Applications: Complete Engineering Guide

In this blog post, we will see how to perform a performance test on a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) application properly, covering both speed and correctness, and how to wire both into a CI/CD pipeline so regressions get caught before they reach production. Performance testing a RAG application requires two separate testing gates: one for speed and one for answer quality. Traditional load testing tools measure response times but cannot detect hallucinations, where a model returns fast but factually incorrect answers grounded in fabricated context rather than retrieved documents.