In distributed stress testing, all the clients linked with the server are tested. Failure to handle such sudden increase could lead to the loss in revenue and reputation.įor stress testing to be successful, system should display an error message while it is under extreme stress conditions and should be able to recover once the load becomes normal.
Stress testing of the website is very important in order to handle such sudden increase in number of visitors. The results of the tests are used to identify bottlenecks, performance improvement areas, recovery / failover mechanisms etc.īelow screenshot shows website when it was down during CyberMonday.ĭuring holidays / promotions, an ecommerce website might witness sudden increase in the number of visitors.Additional points that are noted are – How the website behaves at this time and if it recovers gracefully.The number of users are increased suddenly to the point of failure, until the website crashes and is not longer able to handle additional traffic.These virtual users are programmed to execute common activities like viewing products, adding, removing items from cart and purchasing the product etc.The number of visitors being simulated would be exponentially higher compared to the average number of visitors expected to visit the website on a day to day basis.In order to perform stress testing of the ecommerce application, an extremely large number of visitors hitting the application is simulated using a stress testing tool (listed later in this article).Let us assume that the performance testing team has been asked to stress test an ecommerce application that sells Camping Gears. Stress testing can also be used to uncover data corruption issues, hardware issues. The main purpose of stress testing: Make sure that the system fails and recovers easily, this quality is also known as recoverability. Stress testing tries to break the system under test by overwhelming its resources. Spike testing is also a type of stress testing which is performed when the application is loaded with heavy loads (within maximum limit allowed) repeatedly and sometimes the load on the application is increased beyond the maximum limit allowed for short duration. Stress testing is also called fatigue testing.
The goals of such tests may be to ensure the software does not crash in conditions of insufficient computational resources (such as memory, disk space, network request etc).It put greater emphasis on robustness, availability and error handling under a heavy load, rather than on what would be considered correct behavior under normal circumstances.It is a form of software testing that is used to determine the stability of a given system.It involves testing beyond normal operational capacity, often to a breaking point, in order to observe the results.Difference Between – Stress Testing Vs Load Testing.