stress

Tool to impose load on and stress test Unix-like systems

stress is a tool which imposes a configurable amount of CPU, memory, I/O, or disk stress on a POSIX-compliant operating system. It is written in portable ANSI C, and uses the GNU Autotools to compile on a great number of UNIX-like operating systems. stress is not a benchmark. It is a tool used by system administrators to evaluate how well their systems will scale, by kernel programmers to evaluate perceived performance characteristics, and by systems programmers to expose the classes of bugs which only or more frequently manifest themselves when the system is under heavy load.