Stress Test

[ehiaob]

I have been asked to look into stress testing for an application. I have never done stress testing before. What kind of things can I advise my project manager on stress tests

[bizzzzzare]

Hi, a stress test is used to determine the stability of a system. It generally involves testing the system beyond normal operational capacity loads to observe the breaking point of an application. We generally carry out stress tests by subjecting the application under test(uat) to unusually high loads of users and at the same time providing insufficient resources like memory or disk space. Enabling users to concurrently attack the system would also help in stress testing. There are tools which enable you to carry out stress testing in form of either high operational load or denial of service attacks. tools available we could use load performance testing tools like loadrunner, rational performance tester etc to simulate vusers that would carry out defined set of operations / functionalities. For each run, we could change the system resources to ensure lesser memory availability, lesser disk space utilization and check as to when the application crashes - breakpoint. Generally these are carried out webservers hosting the application. Cheers...

[Neethak]

You need to look for how much stress the application can handle ,suppose your application is assumed to have designed for 500 users accessing the application at same time and it works fine .now in ur stress test u need to keep on adding stress to see at what point it will break ,like it may break for additional 100 users .

[Anshoo_Arora]

ehiaob: In a Stress Test, you find the load under which a system fails, and how it fails. This is the break point of the application. When do we know that the application has failed? When everything starts going really slow and the actual response time from the system exceeds the expected response time. There is no pass/fail in Stress Test, similar to Performance Test. On a simpler note, find out the Business Requirement for response times and monitor your graphs. As the response time starts to exceed the response time for your business requirement, you have reached the stress level of the application. You can also perform Memory and CPU bound tests to know how much memory is consumed per user and how much processing power is consumed per user.

Remember that there are tons of things you can present to your Tech Lead (or whoever) and there are tons of things that you can measure and it all depends on your application.