Google has released a Stress App Test at Google Code. The program, that is released under the Apache 2.0 license, tries to ” maximize randomized traffic to memory from processor and I/O, with the intent of creating a realistic high load situation in order to test the existing hardware devices in a computer”.

The Google Stress App Test was designed for several applications including stress testing but also hardware qualification and debugging, memory interface tests and disk testing.

stressapptest is a userspace test, primarily composed of threads doing memory copies and directIO disk read/write. It allocates a large block of memory (typically 85% of the total memory on the machine), and each thread will choose randomized blocks of memory to copy, or to write to disk. Typically there are two threads per processor, and two threads for each disk. Result checking is done as the test proceeds by CRCing the data as it is copied.

The software program is available for download at the Google Code project page. Installation and usage guides are available on the website.

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As the name suggests it makes use of the ALT key. Whenever that key is pressed windows can be moved by pressing the left mouse button anywhere in it. This will save some miles of mouse movement per month for many users.

Alt Drag comes with the additional feature to snap a selected window to the screen borders or visible windows on the desktop to make better use of the screen estate.

The software itself is portable and supplied in 7z format unfortunately. You need to find an unpacker that is able to unpack the 7z format. The functionality becomes available as soon as the application is started.

The program icon is located in the System Tray. Alt Drag used about 3 Megabytes of computer memory and 1 Megabyte of virtual memory on a Windows XP SP3 test system. Those are pretty good values for a handy application like this.

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Each section is divided into two subsections that link to the presentations and videos. The Powerpoint presentations have to be downloaded to your computer while the videos are embedded on the website itself. Most tutorials on the website are clearly aimed at users with some background knowledge.

If you take a look at the C++ tutorials in the Language section you see that they are not beginners tutorials for instance. The first tutorial is named C++ Threads while the second and last New Features in the Next C++ Standard. Nothing a beginner to C++ programming would want to start with.

The videos however are excellent, the C++ Threads video for instance has a playtime of 1 hour 29 minutes. Strangely though the other video which was hosted on Youtube is not available anymore which is the only video that was not available. All other videos were hosted on Google Video and ran fine.

The website has a Curriculum Search as well which should help to find teaching material. It’s basically a custom Google search.

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