Positive Stress

When is stress good? When it's a .deb package :) What does it do?

It allows you to put the CPU, memory, hard disk, or i/o systems (or all at once if you want) into a loop so you can do stress testing on your system. Why would you want to do that? Well, you can see how your application perform under load, or to identify a bad piece of hardware. Some examples:

Run a CPU test for 30 seconds
stress -c 10 --timeout 30s

Run a memory test for 60 minutes
stress -m 10 --timeout 60m

Run a combined test for 2 days:
stress -m 10 -c 5 -d 2 -i 9 --timeout 2d

Notice how you can specify the number of "hogs"(love that term) for each subsystem.

Be careful that the disk test(-d) will write files and may even fill up your disk(if it's small). Happened to me, but it was very smart and quickly removed its temp files, and exited with an error to let you know what happened.

Also, goes without saying, watch the load on your system and your logfiles to make sure you haven't DOS-ed any of your services. Of course you shouldn't run this outside a scheduled maintenance window, right? :)