Which is better, to start from higher load and reduce , or to gradually increase the load during stress test

Question

For stress test, which is the better approach- to start from higher load and reduce , or to gradually increase the load? I have seen that if we start from a very high load, already the damage would be made and that will have repercussions on the low volumes too. But want a second opinion in this case

Answer 1

Starting with the high load sounds more like a spike test to me

Stress Test is about finding the saturation point and the first bottleneck, if you start with high load you will be only able to state that your system doesn't support "high" number of users, but you won't be able to answer the following questions:

• what is the number of users which is supported by the system without issues (when throughput increases and response time remains the same)
• what is the maximum system performance (number of users and/or requests per second which can be served)
• when errors start occurring and what is the root cause or the slowest component of the integrated system
• does system get back to normal when load decreases
• etc.

So I would recommend increasing the load gradually by defining reasonable ramp-up period