Stress Test
Stress testing evaluates how a system behaves when it is pushed beyond its normal and peak capacity until it fails.
The goal is not performance, it’s:
- Finding the breaking point
- Understanding failure behavior
- Checking graceful degradation & recovery
How Stress Testing Works
Load Pattern:
- Start with normal load
- Gradually increase users/transactions
- Continue increasing until failure
- Observe behavior at and after failure
Unlike spike tests:
- Stress tests are gradual
- Failure is expected
What Stress Testing Validates
Application Layer
- Exception handling
- Timeouts & retries
- Thread starvation
- Error messages shown to users
Infrastructure Layer
- CPU / memory limits
- Auto-scaling limits
- Load balancer saturation
Data Layer
- DB max connections
- Lock contention
- Slow query behavior