Stress testing is also called fatigue testing. Stress testing tries to break the system under test by overwhelming its resources. The main purpose is to check that the system fails and recovers easily (recoverability). Stress testing can also be used to uncover data corruption issues, hardware issues.

• It involves testing beyond normal operational capacity, often to a breaking point, in order to observe the results
• It is a form of software testing that is used to determine the stability of a given system
• It put greater emphasis on robustness, availability and error handling under a heavy load, rather than on what would be considered correct behavior under normal circumstances
• The goals of such tests may be to ensure the software does not crash in conditions of insufficient computational resources (such as memory, disk space, network request etc)

There is a comprehensive list of the widely used stress testing tools. Although many come with a fee, there are free options too.

By way of example and without limitation, we have included some examples where free external applications have been used:

• Cypress example.