stress http://weather.ou.edu/~apw/projects/stress/ stress utility is a workload generator that imposes certain types of stress on UNIX-like operating systems. stress is not a benchmark. It is a tool used by system administrators to evaluate how well their systems will scale, by kernel programmers to evaluate perceived performance characteristics, and by systems programmers to expose the classes of bugs which only or more frequently manifest themselves when the system is under heavy load. Note that a primary design goal is simplicity and portability, so while stress runs on everything from Linux to AIX to K42, it is not as sophisticated as tools like gamut or dbench. In general, stress is has proved useful in a number of disparate research efforts. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Debian Usage: apt-get install stress stress -c 2 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Here is an example invocation: a load average of four is imposed on the system by specifying two CPU-bound processes, one I/O-bound process, and one memory allocator process. $ stress --cpu 2 --io 1 --vm 1 --vm-bytes 128M --timeout 10s --verbose stress: info: [9372] dispatching hogs: 2 cpu, 1 io, 1 vm, 0 hdd stress: dbug: [9372] (243) using backoff sleep of 12000us stress: dbug: [9372] (262) setting timeout to 10s stress: dbug: [9372] (285) --> hogcpu worker 9373 forked stress: dbug: [9372] (305) --> hogio worker 9374 forked stress: dbug: [9372] (325) --> hogvm worker 9375 forked stress: dbug: [9372] (243) using backoff sleep of 3000us stress: dbug: [9372] (262) setting timeout to 10s stress: dbug: [9372] (285) --> hogcpu worker 9376 forked stress: dbug: [9375] (466) hogvm worker malloced 134217728 bytes stress: dbug: [9372] (382) <-- worker 9374 signalled normally stress: dbug: [9372] (382) <-- worker 9373 signalled normally stress: dbug: [9372] (382) <-- worker 9375 signalled normally stress: dbug: [9372] (382) <-- worker 9376 signalled normally stress: info: [9372] successful run completed in 10s