Stress testing. Load it up and don't break it

Your website or online shop is running smoothly. Traffic is growing, more and more people are discovering your site. But will it run smoothly when there are more users? For example, during the Black Friday or Christmas sales?

Quality software is characterised by two important parameters: the speed and quality of processing user requests. Will the new application or platform be able to handle high loads efficiently while maintaining high performance and reliability?

What happens when traffic increases 10 times?
Stress testing is a method of testing software to determine its reliability and resilience to high loads. Stress testing checks the stability of a system with large amounts of data, evaluates its configuration and fault tolerance.

Stress testing requires specialised knowledge and it is not easy for a non-specialist to perform it correctly. Emat EOOD engineers work with HP LoadRunner, Gatling Software, Apache JMeter and BlazeMeter. We perform comprehensive software and application performance assessments, identifying problems from the initial stages of startup through to implementation and deployment.

Stress Test: Load
This test evaluates how a software product will behave under an unplanned load. The aim is to determine how and when the system will begin to degrade or fail. When the test is run, a high load (much higher than the normal operational load) is generated. The following are analysed during a load test: response time, throughput and error rate. The load build time is typically between 5% and 15% of the total test duration. The generated test results show the performance of the application, how the software handles the load and whether it remains stable.

Stress test: Stability
Will the system run reliably under load for an extended period of time? The test identifies potential problems due to resource leaks, improper memory cleanup or other factors that could lead to performance degradation or failure. The system is subjected to an extended period of load and its performance and stability are monitored.

Stress Test: Fault Tolerance
If the primary server fails, is the software developed able to automatically shift the load to other servers or resources? Will the resource be available to users in the event of a hardware or software failure? The test verifies how the primary server or system component responds to failure. A fault tolerance stress test monitors the response of the system, which should automatically switch to backup servers or resources without loss of availability.

Recovery stress test
This test evaluates the speed and efficiency of system recovery. After a load and test failure, it tests the system's ability to recover quickly with no loss of data. Tests include: restoring data, restarting services or switching to redundant components.

Stress test: Volume
How will the software product perform if the database grows hundreds of times? This test checks the system's response to a significant increase in load and data volume. The aim is to ensure that the system is able to operate smoothly and efficiently to process significant amounts of information.

Stress test: scalability
As the number of users grows or new features are added, the load on system components gradually increases. A scalability stress test is performed to comprehensively evaluate the performance of a software product and the reliability of each system component. It allows you to understand how the system components will behave when scaled up and how this will affect performance and availability.

Stress Test: Capacity
How many users can run the system at the same time? This test determines the maximum number of users that can run on the system simultaneously without significant degradation in performance or availability. The test increases the load on the software systems until the performance or availability limit is reached. Purpose of the test: to determine the limits of the system's scalability, to test the system's response to an increase in the size of the database.

Stress testing: comparison
Stress testing compares different hardware (servers, network hardware) and software (operating systems, databases, web servers) options based on their performance, reliability, cost and other parameters.

Stress testing does not detect bugs. It is used to evaluate the system's response when individual components fail. Stress testing identifies failure points, monitors recovery speed, helps to see how the application will behave in the event of overload or external influences: database overflow, hardware failure or intruder attack.