Stress test on a website platform
These tests are focused on ensuring the availability of systems by subjecting them to extreme conditions of use. These conditions, among others, include the excessive sending of requests and execution under limited hardware conditions.
The objective is to attempt to saturate the audited IT infrastructure in order to cause a response failure.
This type of test attempts to simulate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, a very common attack used by cybercriminals to try to disable certain web services and applications.
As a result of this type of attack, problems are identified in the audited infrastructure and in the software that is exposed, such as bad dimensioning of resources, loss or corruption of information, code failures in elements of the system itself or misconfigurations.
Stress tests make it possible to determine:
• The maximum capacity of the audited platform in order to adequately manage a number of visitors in a given time.
• The right moment of degradation in the response times to users and the availability of the audited platform.
• Weaknesses in the platform architecture.
• Critical points where the platform breaks down thereby identifying the affected components for subsequent study and subsequent correction proposals.
It is advisable to implement these tests on real environments, within a timeframe when the correct functioning of the business is not affected. In each test, statistics on the performance of connection, CPU, memory, and other resources will be recorded.
Once all the tests have been completed, conclusions regarding the performance of the application will be outlined, according to the results obtained. Finally, a detailed report will be delivered to the client with all the details of the tests performed, along with the final conclusions and the corresponding proposals for improvements and corrective measures.
