STressing a new server...

[Gary Kline]

On Mon, Jan 02, 2006 at 10:06:52AM -0800, James Long wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 

	Thanks for the tar pointer.  Got to copy over /home here to
	the new box and run several into /usr/tmp.  Thanks to everybody
	for ideas.  I don't want to stress things until something
	*melts*... but some reasonably hard use.  I'm using three or 
	four benchmarks, and a couple of my own tests.  xload and top
	show that the results are a fair simulation of real-world use.
	Should know by the 22nd!

	gary


-- 
   Gary Kline     kline at thought.org   www.thought.org     Public service Unix