[lug] Suggestions for Burn-In testing

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Thu, 2005-07-07 at 12:48 -0600, George Sexton wrote:
> I've run Memtest86 on it, but I was thinking about some sort of software
> that could do some disk write loading, and misc. stability tests. I'd like
> to be pretty confident the box is going to be stable before I spend the time
> doing the final configuration, and actually put it in production.
> 
> Does anyone have any suggestions on what I could use?

For general system stability, including CPU and Memory tests, try the
UnixBench benchmark.  For network throughput you can try ttcp or
netbench, though these probably aren't necessary for system stability.
For disk I/O try bonnie or bonnie++.  

All of these are linked from the Linux Benchmarking web site:
http://lbs.sourceforge.net/

> The box will be hosting our calendar software for 50 customers (initially),
> and hopefully up to 200 before it maxes out.

Those numbers won't be a problem for TCP or the web server.  However,
memory usage and swap space usage are determined by the application.
Heavy PHP use might chew up memory under the web server, for example.
There is a benchmark called WebStone that might help here but I've never
tried it.

If you've got multiple CPU's or cores you can try running multiple
copies of UnixBench.  Each copy should chew up close to 100% of a CPU.
I've run three copies on a 4 core processor (leaving one to keep an eye
on things with "top") and the kernel managed it just fine.

Don't know of any thread benchmarks, but if you run into any let me
know.  I may need them later when working with MPI.
-- 
Michael J. Hammel           |
The Graphics Muse           |           Assassins do it from behind.
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org  |
http://www.graphics-muse.com