Spike Testing
Spike testing evaluates how a system responds to a sudden, sharp increase in load — far faster than a gradual ramp-up — mimicking scenarios like a flash sale, a viral social media mention, or a breaking news event driving an instant traffic surge.
Unlike load testing's gradual ramp-up, spike testing deliberately skips the gentle build-up: traffic jumps from baseline to a high level almost instantly, testing whether auto-scaling, caching, and connection handling can react fast enough, or whether the sudden surge causes cascading failures before the system has any chance to adapt.
Systems that handle steady load well can still fail spike testing badly if their scaling mechanisms have a lag — auto-scaling that takes 3 minutes to provision new capacity does nothing to help during the first, most critical 3 minutes of an unexpected spike.
