Stress Testing is Important

[CrayCray]

Stress testing is the process of placing a system under a simulated load to get useful test data on how the system functions in a mockup production environment. This simulated load often begins as a light load, then is progressively increased further and further. By doing this, it’s possible to test the system under various conditions to ensure it is functioning as expected. While this is occurring, other penetration testers may also be looking for security vulnerabilities that show themselves while the system is under load.

There are three common methods used to stress tests applications. These three testing methods are application stress testing, systemic stress testing and transactional stress testing.

Application stress testing is multiple strenuous requests at once that tries to identify data locking, network congestion, and performance bottlenecks.

Transactional stress testing is when a significant amount of incorrect data that needs to be validated is entered into the application. This seeks to ensure bad data isn’t being accepted by the system at any point and also will assist in determining how to optimize the validation process.

Finally, there’s systemic stress testing which aims to put all the components of the system under as much stress possible and observe the behavior. This type of stress testing will help with understanding how the system responds when under extreme load.

These various techniques can be used to test and validate a software system. By using these techniques it is possible to be confident of how an application will behave in all situations. Even if the system is under extreme load.

 

[Floris]

One of the things that I do when I make a website is keep an eye on the developer tools in the browser, as well as the error.log (s) that the server provides, and I have a session open to trace 'top' (htop) peaks and freezes. This way I can at least capture during design and during development some of the obvious things like "ah, the custom background isn't being cached, and static html pages for guests are not actually being refreshed in time" or "there are long sql queries causing the cpu to go up like crazy.

Once that's all done one of the things I like to do is invite some people to just randomly click on things to cause some errors (hopefully none) and in the meantime I run multiple exports and imports at the same time while stress testing with apache just to see if the expected traffic and unusual behavior is going to be an issue.

It's baby steps, "im a noob" approach, but it's more than others do, and it has helped me catch some obvious issues that could have taken a site down if it would have received even a 100 active online users.

Stress testing is important. I agree.

 

[CrayCray]

Interesting, a/b testing can be an important addition to starting a site. Maybe even more so when the site has gained some traction.

What's the Apache stress testing thing called again?