Soak Testing
Long runs that surface leaks and slow degradation.
4 to work through
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intermediate
A platform passes every load test yet degrades after several days of continuous operation. What class of problem is this, and what testing finds it?
2 min answer -
intermediate
A service is restarted nightly by a cron job and nobody remembers why. What do you suspect and how do you confirm it?
2 min answer -
intermediate
A service performs well in load tests and degrades after several days in production. What class of problem is this, and how is it found before release?
2 min answer -
intermediate
A team proposes replacing its weekly 48-hour soak with a 30-minute soak in every pipeline run. Review the proposal. What would you keep, what would you change, and what can a 30-minute run never find?
3 min answer
2 terms in this topic
Neighbouring topics
Performance & Capacity
General material on performance and capacity engineering.
Latency
Distributions rather than averages, and the floors physics imposes.
Throughput
Work completed per unit time, and why it trades against latency.
Concurrency
Operations in flight, and the limits that are the real capacity ceiling.
Queueing Theory
Why latency explodes as utilisation approaches capacity.
Little's Law
L = λW, and the pool sizes it computes directly.
Bottleneck Analysis
Finding the constraint, and expecting a second one behind it.
Tail Latency
p99 behaviour, amplification across fan-out, and hedged requests.
Load Testing
Realistic data, realistic mix, and a ramp rather than a step.
Stress Testing
Pushing past target to learn what breaks first and how it fails.
Capacity Modelling
Arithmetic before load tests, and headroom for failure as well as peak.
Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling
Scale out for stateless, scale up first for stateful.
Caching for Performance
Layer choice, hit ratio as a first-class metric, and cold-cache recovery.
Database Performance
Plans, indexes, contention and the pool in front of the database.
Connection Pooling
The most common hidden ceiling, and the metric nobody collects.
Network Performance Tuning
Keep-alive, compression, payload size and round-trip elimination.
Performance Budgets
Targets enforced in CI so regressions fail the build.
Profiling & Optimisation
Measuring before optimising, and optimising the dominant term.
Peak Event Readiness
Freeze, pre-scale, shed order, warm caches and rehearse.