New data from 1,500+ QA pros: The 2025 State of Software Quality Report is live
DOWNLOAD YOUR COPY
All All News Products Insights AI DevOps and CI/CD Community

What is Soak Testing? Learn in 5 Minutes

Soak testing detects performance-related issues by requesting the designed load on a system. Learn more about software performance testing types.

Hero Banner
Smart Summary

Soak testing is a critical performance evaluation method designed to ensure system stability and optimize resource utilization over extended periods under sustained load. This comprehensive testing approach proactively identifies and resolves long-term performance degradation, such as memory leaks or resource exhaustion, preventing critical issues before product deployment and guaranteeing continuous system reliability.

  • Uncover Long-Term System Vulnerabilities: Soak testing uniquely assesses system stability and resource behavior under sustained load for extended durations, proactively identifying issues like memory leaks or performance deterioration that manifest over prolonged real-world usage and are often missed by other performance tests.
  • Pinpoint Critical Performance Degradations: Leverage soak testing to specifically detect issues such as memory allocation failures, database resource exhaustion, errors in inter-tier connection management, and the gradual slowdown of response times due to internal data structure disorganization, ensuring system integrity over time.
  • Strategic Deployment and Execution: Integrate soak testing as a vital pre-release requirement, typically after initial load tests and often over weekends due to its extended duration. Plan thoroughly by defining the test environment, designing detailed scenarios, estimating timelines, and employing automation tools to mitigate the time-consuming nature and ensure accurate results.
Good response
Bad response
|
Copied
>
Read more
Blog / Insights /
What is Soak Testing? Learn in 5 Minutes

What is Soak Testing? Learn in 5 Minutes

Contributors Updated on
Soak Testing
A performance testing method that evaluates system stability and resource usage over prolonged periods under sustained load to detect potential issues like memory leaks.

Introduction

If you plan to achieve or look to maintain the maximum performance of your systems during operating hours, you may need a few performance tests verifying your system’s stability and load during the final phase of the development cycle. This kind of test is called soak tests, which help you discover immediate performance-related problems—such as memory leaks or resources leaks—before the release of the product on a particular platform.

What is Soak Testing?

Soak testing (otherwise known as endurance testing, capacity testing, or longevity testing) involves testing the system to detect performance-related issues such as stability and response time by requesting the designed load on a system.

The system is then evaluated to see whether it could perform well under a significant load for an extended period, thereby measuring its reaction and analyzing its behavior under sustained use. Soak testing is a type of load testing.

Read More: Performance Testing vs. Load Testing

There is a myriad of soak testing tools these days, such as LoadStorm, LoadRunner, LoadUI, OpenSTA, Apache JMeter, Appvance, and WebLoad.

Besides, there are some supporting tools that make sure your system works properly under normal conditions, such as Katalon Studio, Selenium, Robot framework.

start testing with Katalon Studio

Why Should You Perform a Soak Test?

Soak testing is mainly used to identify and optimize potential problems, such as memory leaks, resource leaks, or degradation that could happen over time, to avoid impaired performance or system errors. While stress tests will help the development team to test the system to its limits, soak testing takes the system to its limits over a sustained period of use. In other words, soak testing allows the team to mimic real-world usage, in which the users will constantly need access to the system.

What are the Common Issues that Soak Testing Detects?

  • Memory allocation (memory leaks that finally lead to a memory crisis or rounding failures that only display over time).
  • Database resource usage (errors when closing the database cursors under certain conditions that would eventually cause the entire system to come to a standstill).
  • It can also bring about a deterioration in performance, that is, to make sure that the response time after an extended period is as good as it is when the test starts.
  • Errors when closing connections between tiers of a multilayer system under certain circumstances that could block some or all of its modules.
  • The gradual deterioration in the response time of some tasks as internal data structures is less organized over an extended test period.

Before doing any soak testing, it is important to ensure that your system works properly under normal conditions. Katalon Studio provides a simple solution for the software testing system, helping the development cycle run smoothly and guaranteeing a successful deployment.

When to do Soak Testing?

Before a system is released on a particular platform to clients, it must successfully undergo a series of load tests at higher or similar traffic levels. Then you execute the soak test. Soak testing will help you to see how the system runs for a continuous availability period. If there are any issues like memory leaks or memory corruption during the test, they should be reported immediately.

Since the process could take time as long as a day, soak testing should be done over the weekends, although it also depends entirely on the test situation’s restrictions.

Soak testing is now one of the most vital requirements that any team must strictly comply with for a successful deployment.

Benefits of doing Soak Testing

  • It guarantees the application’s fitness.
  • It detects bugs that could not be found by other performance tests.
  • It spots the deterioration in performance, which could happen under high continuous load, and helps to fix those issues so that the application will be more robust.
  • It shows how sustainably the system runs overtime.
  • The test result could be used to validate or improve customers’ infrastructure demands.

Examples of Soak Testing

Ideally, a soak test should run as long as possible, though it will depend on the system for you to determine the duration of your test. Below are some examples when soak testings can be considered:

  • When a bank announces that it will be closing, its system is expected to handle a large number of transactions during the closing days of the bank. This event is rare and unexpected, but your system has to handle this unlikely situation anyway.
  • A system needs to withstand the period of no on-call staff. Usually, this will happen when the staff doesn’t work on the weekend, so the soak test would prove the system’s ability to function for a period longer than a weekends-worth of non-stop operation.
  • Your system is required to process 1000 transactions in 1 hour. You may need to test not only this capability but also go beyond this requirement: testing 1000 transactions in half an hour or 2000 in 1 hour.

Read more: Types of Automation Testing

Several Considerations for Soak Testing

  • A soak test duration is often decided by the system’s availability.
  • Every application must run without interruption.
  • Each system normally has a frequent maintenance window time; such a period will be the key factor in deciding the scope of a soak test.

Challenges of Soak Testing?

  • The test is a time-consuming process, and it would be inconvenient to be conducted on a project with very strict time constraints.
  • You need to use an automation tool together with technical expertise since soak tests run over an extended period of time and consume a lot of data.
  • It is often difficult to determine how much test is worth applying.
  • If the test environment is not correctly detached from the live production environment, the errors found by the soak test could negatively impact the whole working system, causing data loss or data corruption permanently.

Learn more: What is Regression Testing?

Soak Testing Strategies

Before performing a soak test, you need to take a bird-eye view of the system and determine:

  1. Testing Environment: Figure out which hardware, software, database, and operating system to perform the soak test.
  2. Test Scenarios: Since soak testing is an extensive process, it is important to design, review, and finalize the test scenarios before performing any tests. Here, the development team also needs to determine how heavy the load will be put on the system.
  3. Test Estimation: The duration of the soak test is essential depending on the scope of the system. It also depends on the involvement of the development team and clients, actual production use, and more.
  4. Risk Analysis: Consider some questions, such as: How the soak test remains consistent overuse? Are there any bugs that have yet to be detected? Are there any external interferences that will cause the systems to go down?

start testing with Katalon Studio

Ask ChatGPT
|
Katalon Team
Katalon Team
Contributors
The Katalon Team is composed of a diverse group of dedicated professionals, including subject matter experts with deep domain knowledge, experienced technical writers skilled, and QA specialists who bring a practical, real-world perspective. Together, they contribute to the Katalon Blog, delivering high-quality, insightful articles that empower users to make the most of Katalon’s tools and stay updated on the latest trends in test automation and software quality.
on this page

FAQs on Soak Testing

What is soak testing?

+

Soak testing, also known as endurance, capacity, or longevity testing, is a performance testing method that evaluates a system's stability and response time by applying a sustained load over an extended period. It measures how the system performs under continuous use.

Why is soak testing performed in software development?

+

Soak testing is crucial for identifying and optimizing potential problems like memory leaks, resource leaks, and performance degradation that can occur over time under sustained load. It mimics real-world usage to ensure a system's stability and prevent issues before product release.

What common issues can soak testing detect?

+

Soak testing helps uncover issues such as memory leaks (memory allocation problems), database resource usage errors, gradual deterioration in response times, and problems with closing connections between system tiers.

When is the ideal time to conduct soak testing?

+

Soak testing should be performed after a system has successfully undergone other load tests at higher or similar traffic levels, typically in the final phase of the development cycle, before releasing the product to clients. It can take a long time, sometimes even a full day.

What are the key benefits of conducting soak testing?

+

The benefits of soak testing include guaranteeing an application's fitness for prolonged use, detecting unique bugs missed by other performance tests, identifying and resolving performance deterioration under continuous load, demonstrating system sustainability over time, and validating customer infrastructure demands.

Click