Stress testing is a form of testing that is used to determine the stability of a
given system or entity. It involves testing beyond normal operational capacity,
often to a breaking point, in order to observe the results.
Online success is elusive but often when a website does become successful it starts
with a sudden surge of users. Servers being stretched is the reason why several
websites go down when there is growth in traffic. This knowledge of the breaking
point of your website infrastructure is crucial, you may not plan for a million
users hitting your website on day 1 but it is important that you have the information
on how much traffic can you handle before you plan to buy a server or install a
cluster.
This form of testing is intended to find errors due to low resources or competition
for resources.
Low memory or disk space may also reveal defects in the software that are not apparent
under normal conditions. Other defects might result from competition for shared
resources such as database locks or network bandwidth. Often only some of several
system modules fail under pressure pointing towards bad coding or memory leaks which
can be plugged for better overall performance.
Simply put, stress testing identifies the peak load a system can handle.
Pulse engineers use in-house programs as well as sophisticated off the shelf software
to emulate thousands of users on your website to generate a report that not only
contains the maximum supported users but also the speed of degradation and the specific
modules that are most critically affected when your website is under duress.