Stress Testing
Stress testing pushes a system beyond its normal or expected operating limits to find its actual breaking point and observe how it fails — gracefully, with clear errors and no data loss, or catastrophically, with crashes and corruption. It's about finding and characterizing failure, not avoiding it.
Where load testing confirms a system handles expected traffic, stress testing deliberately exceeds it — steadily increasing load past the system's known capacity until something breaks, and closely observing exactly what breaks first and how.
The real value isn't just knowing the breaking point exists — it's characterizing the failure mode. A system that degrades gracefully under extreme load (slower responses, clear error messages, no data corruption) is in a fundamentally healthier place than one that crashes outright or silently corrupts data once pushed past its limits, even if both technically "fail" the stress test.
