Soak tests

We had some discussion around soak tests, as to what the appropriate duration should be and whether ( or what) the performance metric was under measurement.

I would suggest that these tests should be measured as the duration of stable operation under load. The measurement period starts when  full load is achieved on the system under test and terminated when (1) received load (throughput) variation exceeds some threshold (5%?) or (2) some system exception/ failure occurs. The test may be terminated after some user defined period. The user defined period for the test is usually greater than 24 hrs to catch intermittent/ probabilistic system scheduling conflicts that interfere with stable operation. 

Regards
Steven Wright