What is Soak Testing?
Soak Testing is a type of performance testing. Performance testing is done to measure the performance of the particular system under the workload. Performance testing is usually done to monitor the system components and also to verify the stability of the system under certain tests. Performance testing is a Non Functional testing and main aspects of performance testing are the speed of the system, stability of the system, the response time of the system. Usage of the resources.
Performance testing can be done by generating extra load on the system, tracking responses over time, tracking average response timings, change load on the system continuously and then track time of each and every transaction. The sole purpose of performance testing is not to find bugs in the system, but to measure certain characteristics such as average response time.
Soak Testing – Performance Testing Technique:
There is a various number of performance testing techniques, and soak testing is one of them.
Soak testing is a type of performance testing that verifies the stability of system and characteristics of the system for long durations. Soak testing is basically done to ensure that the system is not crashing or there is no abnormal behavior if users are using for long hours (beyond normal hours). Soak testing is done at the system level and also verifies the behavior outside the expectations.
For example, everyone has a limit, parameters are different though, let’s take a simple example, a man, named ‘ABC’ can walk for 4 hours continuously. What will happen if the same man has to walk for 6 hours continuously, he might not be able to walk more or maybe he can walk more after taking a 30 min break? Similarly with the system or application, may be application’s maximum capacity is 6 hours, what will happen if the same application is used for 9 hours or maybe 12 hours, it may behave in an abnormal manner or it may crash. So in order to find out this behavior of application under long hours, Soak test is performed
Soak testing is usually done before releasing the application to the client. Before releasing the application to the client, various types of performance tests are performed in that and soak testing is one of them. While doing soak testing, testers usually come across issues like memory leaks or any other similar failure and help testers to determine how end users can use the application for a longer time. Usually, soak testing is performed on weekends or holidays as application needs to be tested fora longer duration than expected. While doing soak testing, real-time users are needed to use the application/system for a longer time.
As mainly soak testing is done to measure the characteristics of the system for a long duration so while doing soak testing, the user needs to run the system/application for long hours without any halt.
What we expect from a system/application is that the performance of server should not degrade with time, it should remain as it was in the start of the system and if the performance is same, then there are no issues and if it’s degrading then there is an issue.
Soak testing is somewhat similar to endurance testing, in soak testing system/application is used for a longer duration but a number of the user using the system remains the same whereas in endurance testing number of users using the system varies. Tester keeps the checks during endurance testing to check if any error is appearing which is affecting system performance. Soak test is used to determine that when the performance system degrades after a long time of activity.
Soak Tests is usually done before the launch of an application. A number of performance tests are performed before that and soak testing is one of them. Soak testing determines if there is any kind of memory leaks and corruption, and it’s always good to find such things before deployment so that it can be rectified.
This article is contributed by Shweta Abrol
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