What is included

The test is built on a real load profile rather than on an abstract number of users.

Discuss the scope

Load profile

What users do and in what proportion: browsing the catalogue, searching, placing an order.

Scenarios

Scripts that reproduce real behaviour, including the pauses between actions.

Gradual ramp-up

We increase the load and record at what point degradation begins.

Finding bottlenecks

What gives way first: processor, memory, disk, database or an external service.

Stress test

What happens beyond the limit: graceful degradation or total failure, and how the system recovers.

Recommendations

What to configure, what to optimise, what to scale and in what order.

How the work runs

Preparing the scenarios takes a few days. The runs themselves are quick and are repeated after every fix.

01

Goals

What load must be sustained and at what response time. Without a number the test is meaningless.

02

Preparation

A test environment, the scripts and data comparable in volume to production.

03

Runs

Gradual ramp-up with metrics recorded at every level.

04

Analysis

A report with the bottlenecks and optimisation priorities.

Testing on an empty database is pointless. A catalogue of a hundred products behaves differently from one with a hundred thousand: queries that ran instantly start scanning tables. The test environment must be comparable to production in data volume.

Frequently asked questions

Strongly discouraged: the test can take it down for real users and distort your statistics. The right way is a copy on a separate environment. If there is no copy, the test is run at night with limited load and by agreement.

Peak load rather than average, with a margin of two or three times. Average traffic says little: load arrives in spikes after a mailout, an advertising campaign or a mention in the press.

The usual order is: first caching and database query optimisation, which is the cheapest and often gives a multiple improvement. Adding resources is the next step, and reworking the architecture is the last.

We will test your system under load

Tell us what load you expect and when. We will simulate it and show where the system starts to give way.