Soak, endurance, or reliability testing
A soak, endurance, reliability test is a test that runs for a long time (usually for days) under heavy load. It is generally used to detect memory leaks, which may be very slow and take days to impact the system as well as concurrency errors that may otherwise elude us, for example:
- Any (overnight) WebSphere Commerce related jobs, for example, WebSphere Commerce scheduler jobs, data exports or imports, and so on
- Any (overnight) non-WebSphere Commerce scheduled jobs, for example, security checks or audits, backups, and so on
Reliability testing is also a good test vehicle to test end-to-end performance of a fully integrated system. WebSphere Commerce sites can be very extensive or complex depending on your business requirements, integration of sub-components, and integration with other products. Many of these sub-components and products may have been tested separately and by different testers within or outside of your organization. Thus, it is very important for us to test the reliability of the entire system, as the interaction in this complex environment could be the source of many reliability problems.
In Figure 20-4, the reliability workload chart, we can see daily repetitive peak periods and WebSphere Commerce system maintenance activities. ETL refers to the extraction, transformation, and load utilities, for example, for your offline data mining activities. Cache invalidation may be required to clear the cache so that cache can be rebuilt based on the changes loaded into the database. Workspace publish refers to data published as a result of stage propagation or a publish request from the WebSphere Commerce Authoring environment.