forkbomb

System stress testing tool

forkbomb is tool for stress testing. It can create many processes using fork(), bring up some zombies, allocate memory using realloc() and accesses this memory. It has different switches for fine-tuning operation. While classic fork() bomb is good only for fun and QA release testing, running multiple memory-eaters can be useful for determining maximum memory which can be given to servers (bind or squid) without taking machine down. You can test different operation systems with this tool and see how they are handling the load.