Yup. One part of any such test has to involve a large load--I wouldn't want to certify something like that without testing it against a load at least as large

Yup. One part of any such test has to involve a large load--I wouldn't want to certify something like that without testing it against a load at least as large as anything it's likely to encounter in a production environment. Long ago I spent *weeks* narrowing down a load-caused fault, then figuring out how to reproduce it with nothing but the operating system. (Cisco, it was completely irrelevant what software was throwing the load at your switch! When I reproduced it from the command line they accepted it was their problem and at that point it was between management and Cisco, I wasn't involved.)