Stress testing your machine -- what program?

[Fernando Duran]

--- On Mon, 4/18/11, William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> From: William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org>
> Subject: Re: [TLUG]: Stress testing your machine -- what program?
> To: tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org
> Received: Monday, April 18, 2011, 7:46 PM
> When there is nothing going on,
> hdparm, dd, kernel compile, etc., gives
> expected numbers.  When things are going on, however,
> my machine
> crawls/freezes/stutters in a way that is not linear in
> terms of system
> load.  I looked at swap, and it's not even using
> swap.

So problem is not RAM, most likely is Disk I/O and perhaps CPU. 

Check with 'top' or 'htop' when it's in the bad state to check CPU utilization (total and per process). Also with 'ps auxf' see if there are any processes in "D" state, most likely waiting for disk.

This little script may help too: http://pastebin.com/SqhT6zFr , I make it run in servers every 15 mins or so with cron and output to a log file (rotated) as a simple poor man's monitoring, or I use "munin".
 

---------------------
Fernando Duran
http://www.fduran.com


> 
> I found StressLinux from <distrowatch.com>...
> downloading...
> -- 
> William
> 
> On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 09:24:07AM -0700, Fernando Duran
> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I was going to joke "Go to Flash web sites with
> Firefox" but I'll also
> > leave these links: 
> > 
> > http://www.opensourcetesting.org/performance.php
> > http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2008/07/opensource-performance-testing-tools.html
> > http://lbs.sourceforge.net/
> > http://www.testingfaqs.org/t-load.html
> > 
> > You can 'benchmark' HD with hdparm, for example 
> hdparm -Tt /dev/sda ,
> > you can also use 'dd' to move bytes around and 'time'
> it, something
> > like: dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024
> > 
> > I've used this the other way around to create a big
> file and 'md5sum'
> > it several times, getting different results confirmed
> bad RAM. 
> > 
> > The problem is that except for HD, the stress results
> are hard to
> > compare to other systems. 
> > 
> > Also the 'bottleneck' result would be for the
> particular tested load.
> > For a system with any significant disk I/O, the disk
> would be the
> > bottleneck, so the upgrade to look for is a SSD drive.
> The next one up
> > is typically RAM.
> > 
> > For CPU, not a benchmark but when I got a new computer
> I used to
> > recompile the kernel to see how much faster it would
> finish, follow by
> > a mild disappointment.
> > 
> >   
> > 
> > ---------------------
> > Fernando Duran
> > http://www.fduran.com
> > 
> > 
> > --- On Sun, 4/17/11, William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org>
> wrote:
> > 
> > > From: William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org>
> > > Subject: [TLUG]: Stress testing your machine --
> what program?
> > > To: tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org
> > > Received: Sunday, April 17, 2011, 9:31 PM
> > > Hi all,
> > > 
> > > On Windows7, there is "Windows Experience Index"
> under
> > > "System
> > > Properties" which does some benchmarking of cpu,
> memory,
> > > video, and hd.
> > > Probably not very accurate, but it does tell you
> which
> > > sub-system is
> > > bottleneck and needs upgrading.
> > > 
> > > Is there something similar in Linux, say in KDE
> or Gnome,
> > > or even
> > > standalone program?
> > > -- 
> > > William
> > > --
> > > The Toronto Linux Users Group.     
> > > Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
> > > TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text
> below 80
> > > columns
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> > > 
> > --
> > The Toronto Linux Users Group.     
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> 80 columns
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> 
> -- 
> William
> --
> The Toronto Linux Users Group.     
> Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
> TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80
> columns
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> 
--
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