README
1 USAGE
2
3 See the program's usage statement by invoking with --help.
4
5 NOTES
6
7 This program works really well for me, but it might not have some of the
8 features that you want. If you would like, please extend the code and send
9 me the patch[1]. Enjoy the program :-)
10
11 Please use the context diff format. That is: save the original program
12 as stress.c.orig, then make and test your desired changes to stress.c, then
13 run 'diff -u stress.c.orig stress.c' to produce a context patch. Thanks.
14
15 Amos Waterland <apw (a] rossby.metr.ou.edu>
16 Norman, Oklahoma
17 27 Nov 2001
18
19 EXAMPLES
20 [examples]
21
22 The simple case is that you just want to bring the system load average up to
23 an arbitrary value. The following forks 13 processes, each of which spins
24 in a tight loop calculating the sqrt() of a random number acquired with
25 rand().
26
27 % stress -c 13
28
29 Long options are supported, as well as is making the output less verbose.
30 The following forks 1024 processes, and only reports error messages if any.
31
32 % stress --quiet --hogcpu 1k
33
34 To see how your system performs when it is I/O bound, use the -i switch.
35 The following forks 4 processes, each of which spins in a tight loop calling
36 sync(), which is a system call that flushes memory buffers to disk.
37
38 % stress -i 4
39
40 Multiple hogs may be combined on the same command line. The following does
41 everything the preceding examples did in one command, but also turns up the
42 verbosity level as well as showing how to cause the command to
43 self-terminate after 1 minute.
44
45 % stress -c 13 -i 4 --verbose --timeout 1m
46
47 An value of 0 normally denotes infinity. The following is how to do a fork
48 bomb (be careful with this).
49
50 % stress -c 0
51
52 For the -m and -d options, a value of 0 means to redo their operation an
53 infinite number of times. To allocate and free 128MB in a redo loop use the
54 following command. This can be useful for "bouncing" against the system RAM
55 ceiling.
56
57 % stress -m 0 --hogvm-bytes 128M
58
59 For the -m and -d options, a negative value of n means to redo the operation
60 abs(n) times. Here is now to allocate and free 5MB three times in a row.
61
62 % stress -m -3 --hogvm-bytes 5m
63
64 You can write a file of arbitrary length to disk. The file is created with
65 mkstemp() in the current directory, the default is to unlink it, but
66 unlinking can be overridden with the --hoghdd-noclean flag.
67
68 % stress -d 1 --hoghdd-noclean --hoghdd-bytes 13
69
70 Large file support is enabled.
71
72 % stress -d 1 --hoghdd-noclean --hoghdd-bytes 3G
73