Spikes in load
A more typical case than constant load is a short peak of high load. That might be due to people simultaneously dialing into their 9 o’clock meetings, a new update that users are eager to see, or a promotion starting. Your marketing team’s job is to generate this traffic, and it’s often very bursty. Can your system cope?
Testing queues
As mentioned in the Graceful degradation section, this is a test of your system’s buffers and queues. Are they the right size, and do they fill up and empty correctly? You’ll need to identify all the queues designed to spread the load in your system to check their behavior and the locations which should have a queue but don’t.
Queues are particularly important for varied workloads where long, resource-intensive jobs compete with fast, little tasks. You have to ensure small tasks can still be processed quickly, even if large jobs are taking up resources. For instance, if you have multiple...
