Day 33 of 60
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Load, chaos, durability
Soak / endurance testing
Your hour-long load test passed. Then production ran for a week and the heap quietly filled up. Soak tests find what only time exposes.
ProblemMemory leaks, file-descriptor leaks, slow drift under sustained load.
How it works
Run the system at moderate, sustained load for hours or days. Watch RSS, FD count, latency drift.
What it catches
Memory leaks, resource exhaustion, latency degradation over time, scheduled-job interference. Hidden in shorter runs.
Tools
k6 long-run · OSS Locust + Grafana · OSS
Verdict by project size
Small
Skip
Medium
Opt
Large
Rec
Extra-large
Must
Cost
| Project size | Setup | Maint / mo | Tool / mo | CI / run |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small <10k LOC | 4h | 0.5h | $0 | , |
| Medium 10–100k LOC | 2d | 2h | $0 | , |
| Large 100k–1M LOC | 5d | 10h | $200 | , |
| Extra-large >1M LOC | 20d | 40h | $2k | , |
Setup = engineer-days to first useful run ·
Maint = engineer-hours / month at steady state ·
Tool = out-of-pocket $ / month ·
CI = minutes added (or saved) per pipeline run
Lifecycle & ownership
When in lifecycle
Test Release Operate
Per release · Runs before promotion to production.
Who owns it
SRE / DevOps / Platform
CI/CD, observability, reliability
Collaborates with: Developer
Reference implementations
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k6 soak testing guide
Long-running endurance test structure and interpretation.
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JMeter examples
Long-running and protocol-oriented performance test plans.
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k6 test types
Load, stress, spike, and soak test patterns in one reference.
Quick check
Soak / endurance tests are designed to expose…
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