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What's Stress Testing

Software Testing Methodolog


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What's Stress Testing

Overwhelm the product for performance, reliability, and efficiency assessment; To find the breakpoint when system is failure; to increase load regressively to gather information for finding out maximum concurrent users.

Stress tests force programs to operate under limited resource conditions. The goal is to push the upper functional limits of a program to ensure that it can function correctly and handle error conditions gracefully. Examples of resources that may be artificially manipulated to create stressful conditions include memory, disk space, and network bandwidth. If other memory-oriented tests are also planned, they should be performed here as part of the stress test suite. Stress tests can be automated.

Breakpoint:

    the capabilites and weakness of the product:
  • High volunmes of data
  • Device connections
  • Long transation chains

Stress Test Environment:

As you set up your testing environment for a stress test, you need to make sure you can answer the following questions:

  • Will my test be able to support all the users and still maintain performance?
  • Will my test be able to simulate the number of transactions that pass through in a matter of hours?
  • Will my test be able to uncover whether the system will break?
  • Will my server crash if the load continues over and over?


The test should be set up so that you can simulate the load; for example:

  • If you have a remote Web site you should be able to monitor up to four Web sites or URLs.
  • There should be a way to monitor the load intervals.
  • The load test should be able to simulate the SSL (Secure Server)
  • The test should be able to simulate when a user submits the Form Data (GET method)
  • The test should be set up to simulate and authentical the keyword verification.
  • The test should be able to simulate up to six email or pager mail addresses and an alert should occur when there is a failure.

It is important to remember when stressing your Web site to give a certain number of users a page to stress test and give them a certain amount of time in which to run the test.

Some of the key data features that can help you measure this type of stress test, determine the load, and uncover bottlenecks in the system are:

  • Amount of memory available and used
  • The processor time used
  • The number of requests per second
  • The amount of time it takes ASP pages to be set up.
  • Server timing errors.

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