Performance & Reliability Engineering
Finding the thing that actually gives way under load — usually not the tier everyone is scaling — and rehearsing the failure before it is real.
What this covers
Four pieces of work. Most engagements find the real answer in the second.
Load profiles from real traffic
Modelled on your own traffic shape, including the spike, rather than a flat ramp against a landing page that caches beautifully.
Bottleneck analysis
Following the first thing that breaks to its mechanism — the lock, the synchronous call, the pool — instead of adding capacity around it.
Resilience testing
What happens when a dependency is slow rather than down, which is the failure mode that takes systems with it.
Peak rehearsal
The whole journey under the load you expect, run before the season rather than during it.
How an engagement runs
Three stages, six to ten weeks, timed to land well before your peak.
- Stage 01
We rehearse the journey, not the endpoint
Browse to checkout to payment, against a production-shaped environment, so the test exercises what the user does.
- Stage 02
We fix the mechanism and re-run
Every change re-run against the identical profile, so each figure has a chart behind it rather than an argument.
- Stage 03
We leave it running
The profile becomes a scheduled job with the thresholds that mattered wired in as pass/fail. Readiness stops being an annual project.
What you get
What you can say about your headroom afterwards — and show the chart for.
- A known headroom figure you can quote, with the chart behind it
- The real bottleneck named and fixed, not scaled around
- Peak load rehearsed on a schedule instead of survived once a year
Case studies
What this looked like when a team actually had the problem.
Start where it hurts most.
Tell us what this looks like in your delivery and we'll say what we would do first — and whether it needs us at all.