On Fri, Oct 18, 2002 at 02:30:57PM -0600, Ashley M. Kirchner wrote: > > Is there some way to stress load a system see if it will survive? Last > night I posted a kernel oops from a system that crashed and while I realize > that I probably won't get much answers here, I would still like to figure out > what happened. And specially since it hasn't happen after that, I need to try > and get this thing loaded up to where it might crash again. Suggestions > anyone?
It all depends on the kind of load you want to impose on the system. If you want to stress CPU, you could write a small C program that does some heavy numeric computation (such as a Fibonacci sequence) a repeated number of times. The same could be used to stress the process scheduler by running several instances of the same process. It's not difficult to write small programs that stress different parts of a system, and then run an appropiate mix of them to produce different stress patterns. Examples: - Network: Run 'while true; do cat /proc/kcore; done | nc <host> <port>' on one system and 'nc -l -p <port>' on another. Though you should note that this will also have your CPU sky high over a high speed link. - Disk I/O: 'cat /dev/hda > /dev/null' will do the trick. Or 'bonnie++' if you also want to write. - If you need to stress some service on the system, you will have to go to specialized software. I have found that benchmarking software can impose quite a load on services, be this web, database, etc. And so on. You can then mix this stressers to see how your system behaves under different load conditions, such as what happens with my web server when it's under heavy CPU load? what about disk I/O load? I see some people claiming that this does not reflect a real world system load, but this is not a real world test either. It's just an easy way to stress a system and see if this stress has any impact on the parameters you area really interested. Finally, vmstat and xosview will give you a live sample of how much load your system is under. Cheers, -- Javier Gostling Ingeniero de Sistemas Virtualia S.A. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fono: +56 (2) 202-6264 x 130 Fax: +56 (2) 342-8763 Av. Kennedy 5757, of 1502 Las Condes Santiago Chile
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