In this world, anything is possible and you should never limit yourself. So imagine that your business has become truly viral (in the good sense of the word). Literally one mention in the media, or one TikTok video with 1 million views, or a post from a famous influencer, and the traffic to the website is simply cosmic! Pages take a very long time to load, the server is gradually clogged, and orders are also stuck in the cart… The brand image risks rapidly losing its position, and potential customers refuse to do business with your company in the future.
What to do in this situation? Undoubtedly, such situations are not so rare. It’s just that many businesses do not calculate this moment and, accordingly, are simply not ready for such an increase in load. And also, they did not conduct Spike Testing, one of the types of testing that implements the so-called simulation of an instant traffic explosion.
What is Spike Testing?
Spike Testing is a subtype of load testing. It provides the ability to test a system in the context of its response to a sudden surge in requests or users. The main goal of Spike Testing is to predict potential failures in advance and not give them a chance to become a reality. This process can be compared to testing a bridge for resistance to a large crowd running across it at the same time. In this case, the strength of the structure itself and the parts from which this bridge is built are checked and where there is a probability of “cracks”.
How does Spike Testing differ from other types of testing?
To better understand the concept of Spike Testing, we suggest delving a little into its differences from other types of testing:
- During Load Testing, a study is carried out on how the system functions under normal and/or gradually increasing load conditions.
- Stress Testing involves putting the system into stress mode, how it will behave when the load limits are exceeded as much as possible.
- Spike Testing simulates a completely sudden surge, it’s just that the load increase in this case can be very short-lived, but also sharp at the same time.
Why spike is not an exaggeration
At first glance, a quite logical question may arise — why bother so much? The main problem is that in some cases, a delay of even a few seconds in the context of, for example, responding to requests can significantly reduce the overall conversion picture, increase the bounce rate and significantly spoil the user experience. If you value your business and want it to become successful, you should worry about minimizing the risks that a sudden hype can destroy your server. This is where Spike Testing is simply irreplaceable.
Real cases: How a traffic surge “kills” a website
For an even better understanding of how an unexpected increase in traffic can literally “kill” a website, we suggest considering real cases:
- The EdTech platform was mentioned in a full review on YouTube. Literally 30 minutes passed and a massive influx of students to the server occurred. The database could not cope with the increased load, the content did not load normally, and sessions, accordingly, were lost.
- A clothing and footwear store launched a collection in collaboration with one of the local bloggers. The first 15 minutes, and 20 thousand new potential customers “looked” at the website. As a result, what happened? The website completely crashed, all the carts froze — a disaster.
In such cases, Spike Testing would be very effective. After all, conducting this testing preventively predicted this kind of system behavior under similar stressful conditions and optimization of the entire infrastructure would have occurred in advance.
How to conduct Spike Testing: Step by step
The process of implementing Spike Testing is as follows:
- A load scenario is created: It is worth choosing a single spike point. For example, it could be a 300% increase in 30 seconds. Remember, the numbers should be as realistic as possible. How to calculate this? Take as a basis a number of previous campaigns, average traffic indicators, etc.
- Choosing a specific tool: We advise you to choose one of the popular ones:
- Apache JMeter
- k6
- Gatling
- BlazeMeter
However, there is another, no less reliable option — to seek help from real experts in this field, such as the PFLB company, whose team guarantees effective ready-made solutions.
- Forming a separate test environment: In no case do you ever conduct testing on production. PFLB experts create a specialized isolated environment that can fully simulate the architecture of your server and provides the ability to capture accurate metrics without harming your main project.
- It’s time to launch a wave of spikes: This load should be unpredictable, without any preventive warm-up.
- Conducting system monitoring: At this stage, it is extremely important to record such indicators as timeouts, error volumes, changes in the behavior of the server itself, response time, etc.
- Analyzing the situation: After the traffic drops, how quickly can everything recover? Are certain processes still hanging? These are just as important indicators as all of the above.
- Implementing improvements: The final result of the spike test should contain clear and relevant recommendations in the context of further scaling, caching, balancing requests coming to the site, and so on.
What does Spike Testing show?
- The level of system readiness for scaling
- How effective is resource utilization (or is scaling not yielding any visible results?)
- Where exactly is the bottleneck — for example, is it a web server or an API?
- The speed of “pulling up” additional resources to meet the load.
These insights are the guarantee of preventive elimination of any threats before the site crashes in real time. It is these insights that allow you to proactively eliminate threats before the site gets into real “battle”.
Conclusion
The modern world, which is full of digitalization and innovative technologies, is very unpredictable in many aspects. Including success, which can come very unexpectedly. Your site must be ready for these realities and then the wave of hype will not be a blow, but on the contrary, will bring you real successful results. Spike Testing can be safely compared to a bulletproof vest for the technical team. It may be invisible and even in some sense unnecessary on weekdays, but when a traffic attack occurs — it is your savior. Do not put this issue in the “long box”. Prepare this bulletproof vest preventively. If you want to have confidence in the future, not be afraid to look into the future, then the team of PFLB professionals is always ready to become your reliable partner in this.
