Linux stress testing

Stress [http://weather.ou.edu/~apw/projects/stress/] is a simple workload generator for Linux. It imposes a configurable amount of CPU, memory, I/O, and disk stress on the system. Capture the cpu load (uptime,mpstat), IO load (iostat), memory load (vmstat) before and while running the stress.

Sample stress execution :  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