What is stress testing?

The concept of stress testing entails the deliberate load of a system in order to observe the outcome. In software this is used to determine the reliability and stability of an application.

Bunnyshell provides this feature using Locust for web-site capacity testing. This is useful when the goal is to determine the number of simultaneous connections supported by a website while maintaining an ideal page load time, which is the amount of time it takes for a page to show up on your screen, and it is calculated from the moment one clicks on a link or typing a web address (initiation) to when the page is fully loaded in the browser (completion). This provides a realistic insight into how the infrastructure and application behaves in high-load conditions and is a great way to gather the necessary information needed for various optimisations or for decisions pertaining to infrastructure management.

One use-case example would be the need for an e-commerce to simulate a load time similar to that of an event like Black Friday. Knowing in advance how the system would behave during a high-traffic period would allow the e-commerce to anticipate and address potential bottlenecks that slow or even stop access to the e-commerce website during the promotion event. This minimises the possibility of downtime and maximises the number of simultaneous connections supported while page load times are kept to a minimum, thus increasing customer satisfaction and sales.