Graceful degradation
Mainly, stress testing involves taking already present functions and using them excessively, but there is one aspect with dedicated code: graceful degradation. For functions that you expect to be overloaded but you still want to provide some service, your system can detect that state and adjust.
Possibly that doesn’t apply to your system, in which case you can skip this section. However, keep it in mind for specification reviews: if you don’t deliberately handle the case of overload, what do you want to do? Sometimes you can police a limit and prevent additional load by rejecting excess requests. In other situations, you have more subtle options.
Real-world example – Counting the frames
In a video conferencing company I worked for, we implemented graceful degradation in case the load on our system got too high. Our first line of defense was the best: if we couldn’t handle the video processing load, we would leave everyone connected...
