System Stress Script

[Brent W. Moll]

Does anyone have a script which will run up CPU utilization to 100% ?

We are testing some new server monitoring software to alarm and send email when the servers are at high CPU utilization and I need a way to test it.

Thank you :)

[Elmar P. Kolkman · Accepted solution]

You could try:
cd /usr/bin
while true
do
for f in *
do
nroff -man $f &
done
done

But be carefull: it will run indefinitely.

You could also increase usage by setting nice -20 on the command to increase priority.

[doug mielke]

depending on the number of processors you may need to run multiple scripts.

I've done application load testing with variations of this simple loop, run multiple times

while :
do
cp /somedirname/* /dev/null
done

after the first loop of something like this, data will be in cache, and dump to null as fast as memory i/o allows.

You can add some calculatiion type commands to the body if you want to try to eliminate any waits for resouces.

[G. Vrijhoeven]

Hi,

while true
do
nice --10 gzip -c /stand/vmunix >/dev/null &
done

Gideon

[Claudio Cilloni]

#! /usr/bin/env perl

while (1) {
$a = 1
}


this brings _one_ cpu to 100%. Stop it with ctrl-c.

hth,
Claudio

[doug mielke]

correction on the cp command.
a better one is cat /somedirname >/dev/null

the cp will error.
sorry

[Pete Randall]

Multiple find commands will put some serious stress on a machine.


Pete

[Elmar P. Kolkman]

And in my solution you need to add a redirection to /dev/null, off course.

[John Carr_2]

Hi

make sure you do stressing in foreground so you can kill the process ctrl/c . If you set it in background you could have a little difficulty :-) John.