Soak Test
Will our system remain responsive and stable when it is under a significant load over a significant period of time?
Objective: A soak test is a long-running performance test (in this case 24 hours) designed to help you understand your system’s weak spots. For example, the soak test may identify any ongoing “creep” in your application or environment such as memory leaks, that might lead to performance degradation and system instability.
Scope: The soak test would be designed to be specific to your system, using real user data from your key business applications (login/logout, read, write, search) and would be run and completed over a 1 day period. Scapa Technologies consulting services use Scapa TPP, our testing and monitoring tool, to complete the testing.
Outcome: The Scapa Technologies professional services report will provide an understanding of the information gathered during the soak test. The soak test will seek to confirm that your system is able to handle long periods of realistic user activity without suffering problems such as; memory leakage, handle leakage, or loss of stability. It will also help identify any current problem areas or weak spots with a view to helping you to find ways to make these areas more robust and minimize any potential problems that may arise due to “creep” issues.
“Creep” characteristics and signatures exposed during soak testing (such as memory or handle leaks) can be used to identify root cause, resolve issues and improve the overall performance and stability characteristics of the system. Further testing can be arranged with Scapa, in order to prove the effectiveness of any remedial actions.
Optimum time to run: Soak tests should be undertaken prior to deployment, before and after upgrades, before and after migration, before and after patching and frequently on the production systems.
