Load Testing

“If you can fill the unforgiving minute,

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!”

– If by Rudyard Kipling, from the book Rewards and Fairies

In the previous chapter, we saw the importance of destructive testing and trying the failure modes of your system when different services are restarted or offline. In this chapter, we will turn to another vital aspect of non-functional testing – load testing.

Load testing is non-functional because it provides no new checks of the functions of your system. All the tests you run here should have been covered before in black- and white-box testing to ensure they work in at least one scenario. Load testing extends that testing to determine the limits of your system – how does it perform during periods of peak activity? Are operations resilient and reliable...