Stress Testing

Stress Testing

Table of Contents

• Overview
• When to Use
• Quick Start
• Reference Guides
• Best Practices

Overview

Stress testing pushes systems beyond normal operating capacity to identify breaking points, failure modes, and recovery behavior. It validates system stability under extreme conditions and helps determine maximum capacity before degradation or failure.

When to Use

• Finding system capacity limits
• Identifying breaking points
• Testing auto-scaling behavior
• Validating error handling under load
• Testing recovery after failures
• Planning capacity requirements
• Verifying graceful degradation
• Testing spike traffic handling

Quick Start

Minimal working example:

// stress-test.js
import http from "k6/http";
import { check, sleep } from "k6";
import { Rate } from "k6/metrics";

const errorRate = new Rate("errors");