A stress test will measure a website's ability to handle incremental load, and then determine the pointed at which it will crash, or fail due to server high load.

A breaking point, the apex load that an application can sustain before crashing, is also measured in a stress test.

Obviously, some business SLAs may not be meet during this breaking point.

Some advantages of stress tests are:

• Identifying performance issues on the surface, which may only appear during times of high load extremes;
• Checking the full capacity of an application, and its behavior tendencies during heavy loads.

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