Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 28 Dec 1998 00:38:56 +0000 | From | "Bjarni R. Einarsson" <> | Subject | How to stress test? (and 2.0.x SMP yucks) |
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Hi,
I have a spanking new machine destined to be a high-volume production mail server. I want to try and stress-test it to see what will break (if anything) - I'd like to detect as many problems as possible before we put it in the computer room. I'm looking for typical things like memory/controller/problems which surface quickly.
The machine's specs are:
Dual PII/350 128MB 100Mhz RAM 3c590 network adapter 2x AHA2970 4x IBM scsi (4GB), destined to be a raid5'ed /var/ partition. Small IDE disk for the root (should be 95% read-only).
I'll be using kernel 2.0.36 to begin with, anxiously anticipating the release of 2.2.0. :-)
My question is, what methods do people use to stress test sw/hw combinations?
I've currently got the machine in lots of tight loops making TCP connections to itself constantly, and compiling the kernel willy-nilly, but I was wondering if any of you had any better ideas for me.
Also, are there any obvious problems with this hardware configuration?
Btw, I think I came up with a pretty clear-cut demonstration of why 2.0.x SMP isn't good enough:
dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1024k count=24 | gzip -c |zcat >/dev/null
locks the machine up reeeal tight for 1-2 seconds, with incredibly delayed (or missing) responses from the console itself (just switching VTs could take 2-3 seconds). This is actually bad enough to be a primitive denial of service attack..
This same command didn't have any noticable effect on my trusty old single-processor 5x86/160 here at home, so it appears that enabling SMP can in some cases cause a performance hit instead of a gain. (I suppose this is probably old news, but I thought I'd see if any interesting discussions would result from my experience.. ;)
Thanks in advance, and happy holidays!
-- Bjarni R. Einarsson [ PGP: 02764305 / B7A3AB89 ] bre@netverjar.is -=- http://www.mmedia.is/~bre/ -=- Juggler@IRCnet
* http://www.europarl.eu.int/dg4/stoa/en/publi/166499/execsum.htm * Encrypt the covert narcotics, launder nuclear biotechno cash on the way to Swiss with your GSM phone - are you paranoid enough?
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