In my mind stress tests and unit tests are different things. Stress tests should not be run with the unit tests as part of a regular build. They would be in the same src/test dir, but everything matching *StressTest.java would be excluded. We should be running these with some separate maven goal like 'maven test:stress' or something similar (a similar thing could perhaps be done with the integration tests in openejb, 'maven test:integration').
My motivation is two fold. One, the stress tests slow the build down so much that it's clear people are trying to get by without having to build everything--frequently breaking builds is a tell-tale sign. Two, if we are going to do stress tests, which is good, we should really go all out and hammer the server. I'm talking about tests that nail the server for like a half an hour filling up pools, trashing memory, stretching the thread count, and generally pushing things to their limit. We already do nightly build/test runs on several machines, it would be fairly trivial to setup a machine to run the stress tests as well. Though it would be better to use dedicated hardware for these as the resource consumption would go beyond responsible usage of boxes performing other critical tasks. Thoughts? -David
