Stress and Volume Testing - Your Experiences?

Tarohann asks: "I work for a large software services company and I'm planning to write an article on Enterprise application Stress and Volume Testing (SVT) based on a couple of experiences I've had. For the most part I feel that most Enterprise SVT initiatives performed by companies at the enterprise level are flawed as they are done on ideal/non-production environments. I was wondering if anybody here has had any good/bad experiences or pointers (websites, books) I can refer to on this subject. Full credits will be given. Thanks, Slashdot!"

Comments

Ideal environments are your fried sometimes!

[basking2]

Sometimes ideal environments offer higher throughput and stress on a system. Consider a webapplication on a busy network with one interface. Very typical and much lower stress than you might expect. Consider the stress-volume environement: You could have 3 nicks on a quiet switched segemnt and HAMMER the server.

Obviously, you want to profile your testing environment while testing to find a bottle neck and work it into your analysis. During one testing experience we found that the IDE drive started working very very hard and limited our throughput!

Just some thoughts. Home you find it interesting.

Extrapolating worst-case loads

[G4from128k]

You might look into using something like the Pareto distribution or Zipf's Law for estimating the probability of low probability, high-magnitude loads on the system. A little math like this in conjunction with a limited sample size of observed input load levels will help you guesstimate the 99.9999...% level of loading.