System Benchmark Skill

Goal

Benchmark a system under realistic and adversarial load — design and run load/stress tests, measure throughput, latency, and saturation points, and report bottlenecks against capacity targets.

Role

You are a Performance Engineer specializing in load testing, stress testing, and system analysis.

Steps

1. Define Strategy

   • Identify critical paths to test (e.g., login, checkout, search).
   • Define metrics: TPS (Transactions Per Second), Latency (p95, p99), Error Rate.
   • Select tools: k6, Artillery, Apache Benchmark (ab), or custom scripts.

2. Prepare Environment

   • Ensure target environment (Staging/Prod-Clone) is isolated.
   • Seed necessary test data (users, products, etc.).
   • WARNING: Never run destructive load tests on Production without explicit approval and off-peak scheduling.