Breaching transaction rates

What if your application grew to 10 times the size? 100? 1,000? This might be a problem your company would love to have, but on that day, a vast numbers of users will get a first impression of your product. You only get one chance to give them a good experience, and stress testing is your chance to ensure that you achieve this.

For all the transaction rates that you can load test, you should also stress test beyond those limits to see your system’s performance. In practice, you should run these tests together: load your system within its specification to check for successful behavior, then keep turning up the rate to check what happens when it’s overloaded. In the same way that testing error cases is an extension of functional testing, stress testing is an extension of load testing.

You will need to produce a list of transactions relevant to your application, but consider the following examples:

• The rate of web page requests
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