StressTesting

Stress Testing

A large portion of the problems that appear in systems under production are related to issues of scalability and availability. Common issues stem from the quantity of simultaneous users, mean time between failures, number of hits per second, quantity of data transmitted, among others. These kinds of problems can and should be detected before production launch. It is for this reason that Vates offers stress testing services, utilizing an open source tool. This service allows:

Identification of problems of scalability: through stress testing various load scenarios (concurrent users) can be simulated, at determined times. During the stress tests, data is collected such as CPU use, memory use, disk access, bandwidth use, and response time. This permits the identification of the scenarios that may create problematic conditions for the applications with respect to the use of critical resources such as those previously mentioned. This information is essential for verification of how the hardware as well as the software are sized and configured with respect to the projected user load. This type of test also allows the detection of the threshold under which it is necessary to add more critical resources such as memory, disk space, or even another server. This is of vital importance for live versions since the operations area must plan the acquisition of new hardware or services based on projections of user concurrency.

Identification of problems of availability: through stress testing different load scenarios (concurrent users) can be simulated, at determined times. During these tests it is verified whether the servers continue functioning and responding within the established minimum times. If the servers cease to respond or take longer than prescribed, a problem of availability is established.

JMeter: (http://jmeter.apache.org/) is a software tool which is ideal for stress testing web applications and web services.

It is important to note that the large quantity and variety of data offered by these tools allows us to satisfy the information needs of diverse actors such as developers, architects, project leaders, QA specialists, and end users. QA specialists and end users can validate non functional requirements such as response times, and availability, among others. Architects and developers can obtain information to improve the availability and scalability of the application. Detail of the product used: