stress FOR LINUX

Stress

Stress is a handy tool that puts a customizable load on your CPU, memory, I/O, and disk for systems that follow POSIX standards. It’s written in portable ANSI C and can be compiled on most UNIX-like systems using GNU Autotools. Plus, it’s free software under the GNU GPL license.

What is Stress Used For?

Now, stress isn't a benchmark tool. Instead, it's something system administrators use to see how well their systems handle heavy loads. Kernel programmers might also use it to check out performance characteristics. And if you're a systems programmer, this tool helps you find bugs that only pop up when the system is really pushed to its limits.

Where Can You Find Stress?

You can find stress listed in the GNU Free Software Directory and there's even an entry about it on Freshmeat. It's part of the Linux Test Project and is included in a specialized distribution called stresslinux. Oh! And there’s a cool write-up about it in Linux Magazine [pdf]. Even Engler's 2004 OSDI paper talks about it while discussing serious file system errors [pdf].

An Example Command

If you want to try out stress, here’s how you can run it: let’s say you want to impose a load average of four on your system with two CPU-bound processes, one I/O-bound process, and one memory allocator process. Here’s what that command looks like:

$ 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)

If you're interested in downloading Stress, check out this link!