Linux cpu stress test install#
Linux cpu stress test full#

We can run the mq stressor with the -perf option to see some more detail on what the machine is doing during the run: Now consider a more interesting stress test, such as passing messages between processes using a POSIX message queue. The total CPU time was 4 x 60 seconds (240 seconds), of which 0.13% was in the kernel, and 85.50% in user time and stress-ng only got 85.64% of all the CPUs (since the machine was a bit busy doing other work at the same time). In the above example, I ran this on a machine that wasn't particularly idle with 4 CPU threads, so 4 instances were executed. Stress-ng: info: 240.00s available CPU time Stress-ng: info: successful run completed in 60.00s (1 min, 0.00 secs) Stress-ng: info: dispatching hogs: 4 matrix You can get an idea of how much user time and system (kernel) time is being used via the -times option: If you want to run an instance of this on ALL the CPUs on your machine, specify 0 instances and stress-ng will figure out how many to run:

To run 1 instance of this for 60 seconds, use: Of all the tests, this one generally heats x86 CPUs the best. The matrix stressor is a good way to exercise the CPU floating point operations as well as memory and processor data cache. This document is a quick-start reference guide and covers some of the more typical use cases for stress-ng.

Linux cpu stress test full#

The tool has a wide range of different stress mechanisms (known as 'stressors') and a full description of these is included in the man page. Use stress-ng with caution as some of the tests can make a system run hot on poorly designed hardware and also can cause excessive system thrashing which may be difficult to stop. Stress-ng was originally intended to make a machine work hard and trip hardware issues such as thermal overruns as well as operating system bugs that only occur when a system is being thrashed hard. stress-ng also has a wide range of CPU specific stress tests that exercise floating point, integer, bit manipulation and control flow. It was designed to exercise various physical subsystems of a computer as well as the various operating system kernel interfaces. Stress-ng will stress test a computer system in various selectable ways. Processing triggers for gnome-menus (3.13.3-11ubuntu1.1). Processing triggers for man-db (2.8.3-2ubuntu0.1). Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.23+linuxmint4).

Processing triggers for mime-support (3.60ubuntu1). 259002 files and directories currently installed.)

Selecting previously unselected package htop. The following NEW packages will be installed:Ġ upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 245 not upgraded.Īfter this operation, 221 kB of additional disk space will be used.

Linux cpu stress test install#

On my Dell XPS 13 laptop with Linux Mint it means this: :~/proj$ sudo apt install htop If you don’t have the htop command on your Linux system yet, you can easily install it. We confirm the number of CPU cores available on the system and then start a number of dd processes in background: :~/proj$ for i in `seq 1 $(cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep 'physical id' | wc -l)` do dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null & done My example refers to /proc/cpuinfo file, which is Linux specific. Screenshot above shows how a stressed system looks – all CPU cores are 100% busy. By making it work with /dev/zero and /dev/null (which are not real devices in terms of disk I/O), you’re effectively getting dd to shift a whole lot of zero bytes between addresses in virtual memory – thus causing CPU (and possibly a bit of RAM) stress. One of the really interesting ways of stress testing CPUs on your system is using dd command.