What is a Stress Testing?
Stress Tests determine the load under which a system fails, and how it fails. This is in contrast to Load Testing, which attempts to simulate anticipated load. It is important to know in advance if a ‘stress’ situation will result in a catastrophic system failure, or if everything just “goes really slow”. There are various varieties of Stress Tests, including spike, stepped and gradual ramp-up tests. Catastrophic failures require restarting various infrastructures and contribute to downtime, a stress-full environment for support staff and managers, as well as possible financial losses. Stress test is one of the most fundamental load and performance tests and needs to be well understood.
