don’t just test your system with your usual workloads. See what happens if you take the number of calls the front end could possibly make, double it, and direct it all against your most expensive transaction. If your system is resilient, it might slow down—even start to fail fast if it can’t process transactions within the allowed time (see Fail Fast)—but it should recover once the load goes down. Crashing, hung threads, empty responses, or nonsense replies indicate your system won’t survive and might just start a cascading failure.
