Stress Testing and Load Testing

Stress testing is a performance and capacity test: it replays what real users do (log in, search, add to cart, pay) at high concurrency. DDoS testing measures your protection layers against malicious attack traffic. They answer different questions and are usually planned separately.

• How many concurrent users can the application serve with acceptable response times?
• What happens beyond the limit: graceful degradation or failure?
• Where is the bottleneck: application server, database, network, load balancer or a third-party service?
• Does the system recover on its own when load drops?

• Load testing: Whether expected peak traffic is handled smoothly.
• Stress testing: Increasing load gradually beyond the limit to find the breaking point.
• Spike testing: Reaction to sudden traffic surges, such as during a campaign launch.
• Soak testing: Memory leaks and performance degradation under sustained load.

A production-like test environment is preferred where possible. If production testing is required, safeguards are planned in advance.

• Written authorization and a clear list of endpoints in scope.
• Testing in a maintenance window or off-peak hours with gradual ramp-up.
• Advance notice to hosting, CDN, cloud and payment providers.
• Isolation of irreversible actions such as real orders, payments or SMS messages using test data.
• Immediate stop procedure and real-time monitoring.

• Response time, error rate and throughput charts by load level.
• Capacity limit and breaking point.
• Bottleneck analysis and prioritized recommendations.
• Comparative retest after improvements.

E-commerce sites, ticketing and booking platforms, public service portals, mobile app backends and any organization that experiences traffic surges during campaigns.