Soak test
Also called: Endurance test, Long-run test
A soak test runs a game build for many hours without restarting to catch memory leaks, slowdowns and crashes that only appear over long sessions.
A soak test leaves a build running for a long stretch, often overnight, while a tester or a script keeps it busy. The goal is to find problems that need time to show up, such as memory that grows until the game crashes, frame rate that drops after a few hours, or save files that slowly corrupt.
On Steam, these bugs hit the players who like the game most, because they play the longest sessions. Typical cases are survival and management games left running in the background, idle mechanics, or a co-op server hosted for a whole evening. Steam Deck sessions on battery add heat and throttling to the picture.
QA sets up a soak test with a fixed scenario, a memory and frame time log, and checkpoints every hour. The report compares the start and end values and attaches the crash dump if the game falls over. A soak run is cheap in human time, so it pairs well with a regression pass on a release candidate.
Updated · Written by JJ, founder of Jumbo Jelly.
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Related terms
- Desync
A desync is a multiplayer bug where two or more players' game states drift apart, so each client shows a different version of the same match.
- Regression pass
A regression pass retests features that already worked after a code change, to catch bugs the new patch broke in old parts of the game.
- Steam Deck Verified
Deck Verified is Valve's top Steam Deck compatibility rating, given when a game passes all checks and needs no configuration from the player.