Stress Testing

“OVERWORK, n. A dangerous disorder affecting high public functionaries who want to go fishing.”

– Ambrose Pierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

We now come to the final form of testing considered in this book: stress testing. These are some of the hardest tests to run and the most stringent checks on your application. Stress testing is a combination of testing load and error cases, as you push your system beyond its limits.

In the last chapter, we considered load testing, which ensured an application could perform up to its required performance. If a website can handle 10,000 simultaneous users, testing must reach that number without seeing a degraded performance. The pass mark for these tests isn’t just completion, but also the time taken for each action. Stress testing comes next, going beyond system limits.

How does your application cope when the 10,001st user attempts to join, a user tries to extend their connection beyond...