Soak Testing - Software Testing

Soak Testing is a type of software testing in which a system is tested under a huge load over a continuous availability period to check the behavior of the system under production use. 
Soak Testing tests that the system can withstand a huge volume of load for an extended period. 

This testing is performed at the system level to find whether the system will stand up to a very high volume of usage or not. It also tests that what would happen outside the design expectations of the system. 

Objective of Soak Testing

• Identification of Risk: Determine the potential risks associated with extended use and evaluate the system's capacity to manage situations like data accumulation, transaction logs and database expansion over time.
• Planning for Capacity: To help with capacity planning and to make well-informed decisions regarding resource scaling as system usage increases, collect data on resource consumption trends.
• Testing for Compliance: Make that the system meets the long-term performance criteria outlined in service level agreements (SLAs).
• Validation of User Experience: After extended use, assess the overall user experience to make sure the system continues to operate at a level that is appropriate in terms of responsiveness and performance.

Failures detected by Soak Testing

The failures or issues detected by the Soak Testing are:

• Memory Leaks: 
  Soak testing detects serious memory leaks which can cause application crashes or lead to the crash of the operating system.
• Layer Connections Failure: 
  Soak testing finds the failure of close connections between the layers of the system that can interrupt the modules of the system.
• Database Connections Failure: 
  Soak testing detects the failure of close database connections under some conditions that may crash the complete system.
• Response Time Degradation: 
  Soak testing finds the degradation of the response time of the system as the system becomes less efficient and takes more time to respond.

Soak Testing Graphical Representation

Advantages of Soak Testing

• Improves the performance: It makes bottlenecks detectable and optimizable, which eventually improves performance as a whole.
• Increases the Resistance: It evaluates how flexible and resistant to failure the system is under ongoing stress. This can highlight weak areas and vulnerabilities that might not be visible during shorter testing times.
• Working under heavy load: Soak testing helps to ensure a dependable user experience by making sure the system can withstand such loads without degrading.
• Improves the behavior: It offers views into the system's behavior over time, particularly under high loads.

Disadvantages of Soak Testing

• Difficult to Predict: It is difficult to know or predict how long that the test will run.
• High Memory Utilization: Utilization of the memory is high due to more number of users accessing the web application.
• Time-Consuming: It is a time consumption process, and it is not recommended for the project which has strict deadlines.
• Wrong Results: Manual soak testing often takes a lot of time to complete the test and often provides wrong test results.
• Data Loss: If we run this technique in a live environment then it will lead to loss of data or data corruption.

Conclusion

In order to guarantee a system's endurance, stability and dependability under continuous load for an extended amount of time, soak testing is essential. It continues to be a crucial procedure for enterprises looking to produce dependable and high-performance applications in long-term, real-world scenarios as systems get more complicated and technology advances.