STressing a new server...

[James Long]

A buildworld is indeed an excellent test of memory, CPU, drives
and cabling.

The memory tester is sysutils/memtest.

It's not a very scientific test, but one thing I do is a 
make -j8 buildworld whilst I do a large tar operation,
optionally with compression.  Just anecdotally it appears
that tar likes to use lots of memory.  I usually do some 
sort of file system move, ala:

tar jcf - original | tar xpvf - -C copy

Make sure you have enough disk space to burn.

This has caught dodgy memory on servers in the past.


Jim