Even benchmarks can be easy to handle

Stress Test

Article from ADMIN 08/2012

By Federico Lucifredi

We show how to perform quick and easy benchmarks using stress.

Benchmarks are finely tuned mechanisms, fraught with complexity and exceptions users must be aware of, lest the results be completely and utterly meaningless – with one exception: pushing a device to 100% of its capacity on a single metric. This simple, easily understood measurement is remarkably portable across machines and nearly foolproof. If used correctly, single-metric benchmarks are a quick tool for debugging and tuning, providing objective and easy-to-obtain numbers that put an upper limit on what a system can accomplish under ideal conditions. This approach lets you pinpoint what a system's real-world performance cannot possibly exceed. It's an ideal test, even when more sophisticated approaches are needed to forecast the performance of an actual workload.

My original aim was to measure the power consumption of a Plug Computer [1] in its idle state (as defined by the manufacturer) and when running at full throttle. Many embedded devices run Linux these days, so this is not an uncommon scenario. When I was on the verge of reinventing the wheel, a colleague in the Ubuntu QA team pointed out a highly portable tool suitable for my aims: stress [2].

Stress (easily found in the eponymous Ubuntu universe package) is designed to put load on a system to stress-test it. Stress is very portable: A single C file is all you need to compile when your distribution's packaging fails you – not a small consideration when you are looking at different architectures in your tests as I am. Stress is also portable across the *nix family, being equally at home on Linux, BSD, Mac, and a variety of Unix platforms.

As you go through stress's options, you can visualize its effect on the system via Byobu's [3] status line, the Gnome System Monitor

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