[TriLUG] Burn-in Software (James Jones)

[Maxwell Spangler]

On Thu, 2009-12-10 at 13:36 -0500, John Brier wrote:
> http://packages.debian.org/lenny/stress

> A tool to impose load on and stress test a computer system
> 
> 'stress' is a tool that imposes a configurable amount of CPU, memory,
> I/O, or disk stress on a POSIX-compliant operating system and reports
> any errors it detects.
> 
> 'stress' is not a benchmark. It is a tool used by system
> administrators to evaluate how well their systems will scale, by
> kernel programmers to evaluate perceived performance characteristics,
> and by systems programmers to expose the classes of bugs which only or
> more frequently manifest themselves when the system is under heavy
> load.

This looks like a good time to remind the workers that the best way to
test a machine is to give it an excess of the actual workload you expect
to operate upon it.  So if your new database server needs to handle
1,000 concurrent users, scale it up to 3,000 (maybe in increments of
500) in order to observe how it handles, where performance peaks, what
bottlenecks occur and where it fails.

This is excellent preparation for those occasions where the business
side of an organization wants to scale up to more workload and IT folks
ought to be ready for it in advance.

-- 
Maxwell Spangler