Stress Testing
Stress Testing Linux Systems
Introduction
t may be required to run performance tests on a Linux server to either benchmark system performance or to validate monitoring systems work as intended. To do this we need to introduce stress testing.
stress and stress-ng
There are 2 common packages available to run stress testing on individual compute components such as CPU, Memory, Disk or Network. These are stress and stress-ng. The stress package is available in the default CentOS 7 repositories and stress-ng is available in the EPEL repository.
Installing stress
The following steps detail install stress on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 server. The same steps can be applied for Fedora, RHEL, Amazon Linux 2 or Oracle Linux (OL).
sudo yum install epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm. ## Install the repo file - note that the version of base RHEL is detailed in the package this package is for a RHEL 7 based system
sudo yum repolist ## List the configured repos and validate that EPEL is now listed
sudo yum install -y stress. ## Install the stress package and dependencies
Running stress
The stress package provides a number of options to stress test the system. The following example will stress test the CPU for 60 seconds across 4 cpu cores.
stress --cpu 4 --timeout 60s
Below will run a memory test using 8 worker vm nodes to consume 2GB each for a total of 16GB memory allocation load for a run time of 10 minutes (600 seconds)
stress --vm 8 --vm-bytes 2G --timeout 600s
