Endurance Testing
What is Endurance Testing?
The word Endurance means ‘the capacity of something to last or to withstand the wear and tear.’ You can simply call it as durability, lasting power or longevity.
When it comes to the world of software, Endurance test (soak testing or longevity testing or capacity testing) is a type of non-functional testing which is done to check if the software system can sustain under a huge expected load continued over a long period of time.
Endurance Testing
It is one of the performance testing type and a sub-type of load testing.
Why Endurance Testing?
The main purpose of performing this testing is to identify any potential memory leaks. So, during this testing, memory utilization is closely monitored. Hope you are aware of the concept of memory leaks. Still, let me brief what a memory leak actually is to those who may be new to this term.
A memory leak is a failure in a software program to release discarded memory, causing impaired performance or failure.
A memory leak might not have a short-term impact but in the long-term, it slows down the system which leaves no free memory and thus finally leading to application or system crash. Memory leak is an issue which becomes apparent only after a certain period of time.
Hence, we need endurance testing to uncover such issues.
However, it might be possible that with a huge significant load, your application works well for some period say, 1 hour. But, when exposed to the same amount of load continuously for a longer period say, 3-4 hours, your application gets crashed down due to resourcing issue and insufficient disk space.
Another important issue which endurance software testing targets to identify is its performance degradation. It needs to be ensured that the throughput or response times after prolonged use are equivalent to or improved than at the beginning of the test.
Duration of an Endurance Test
If it’s a 24*7 nonstop operation project, then ideally an Endurance Test should run for 72 hours. The reason being the application should be capable enough to get run unattended on weekends (as weekend support is costly for organizations).
So, we need to test the system exposed to a significant load for a period slightly larger than a weekend. However, as running the test for 72 hours could be too cumbersome, generally, we run the endurance test for 12 hours.
Benefits of Endurance Testing
The benefits derived from this testing are enlisted below:
It ensures the fitness of an application.
It uncovers those bugs which otherwise cannot be found by any other performance test. For Example, you might not find the memory leak issue during volume testing or stress testing.
If the test environment is not isolated properly from the live production environment, then the application or network failures in the endurance test can hamper the entire working system and result in permanent data loss/data corruption.
Unhandled exceptions are observed by the customer.
An Example
An example where Endurance testing is required and can be used is the Banking application.
On the closing days of the bank, the application is tested to know if the system can sustain under continuous expected load or a large number of transactions for long.
If you are looking for a Top Endurance Testing Lab for your product in Delhi-NCR, India then Matrix Test Lab is a name of trust for all your queries related Endurance Testing services in India. To improve the quality of the product & to cope-up the demand, Matrix Test Lab also, in short known as MTL, initiated Endurance Testing services to provide reliable & efficient testing services to esteemed clients as per National & International protocol.
We at MTL, provide complete automotive testing solution ranges from Electrical/Mechanical safety testing to Environmental Testing to ensure, safe and reliable products.