Test your Linux systems when they are under stress of high load.
This command line tool that allows to generate a workload on the system.
Execute the following commands to update the package lists and install stress:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y stress
Run the stress command with a --cpu option followed by number of workers to perform CPU stress testing.
The --timeout option stops stress testing after N seconds.
The uptime command can be used to determine the average system load before and after running a stress command.
uptime
sudo stress --cpu 8 --timeout 20
uptime
Example of the output:
user@linux ~ $ uptime
17:20:00 up 7:51, 2 users, load average: 1.91, 2.16, 1.93 [<-- Watch Load Average]
user@linux ~ $ sudo stress --cpu 8 --timeout 20
stress: info: [17246] dispatching hogs: 8 cpu, 0 io, 0 vm, 0 hdd
stress: info: [17246] successful run completed in 21s
user@linux ~ $ uptime
17:20:24 up 7:51, 2 users, load average: 5.14, 2.88, 2.17 [<-- Watch Load Average]
Remove stress with command:
sudo apt purge --autoremove -y stress