Stress Testing:
Stress testing is a form of testing that is used to determine the stability of a given system or entity. It involves testing beyond normal operational capacity, often to a breaking point, in order to observe the results. Stress testing may have a more specific meaning in certain industries.
In software testing, stress testing often refers to tests that put a greater emphasis on robustness, availability, and error handling under a heavy load, rather than on what would be considered correct behavior under normal circumstances. In particular, the goals of such tests may be to ensure the software doesn’t crash in conditions of insufficient computational resources (such as memory or disk space), unusually high concurrency, or denial of service attacks.
For example a web server may be stress tested using scripts, bots, and various denial of service tools to observe the performance of a web site during peak loads.
Stress Testing
of Computer Hardware:
When modifying the operating parameters of a CPU, such as in overclocking, underclocking, overvolting, and undervolting, it may be necessary to verify if the new parameters (usually CPU core voltage and frequency) are suitable for heavy CPU loads. This is done by running a CPU-intensive program (usually Prime95) for a long time, to see if the computer hangs or crashes. CPU stress testing is also referred to as torture testing. Software that is suitable for torture testing should typically run instructions that utilize the entire chip rather than only a few of its units.
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