gHacks technology news » stress test http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:31:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Google Stress App Test http://www.ghacks.net/2009/10/19/google-stress-app-test/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/10/19/google-stress-app-test/#comments Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:04:17 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=17459 Google recently published a study in corporation with the University of Toronto that came to the conclusion that computer memory error rates are higher than previously suspected. The study, conducted over the course of 2.5 years on tens of thousands of Google servers, revealed that a third of all machines in the test experienced at least one memory error per year with the amount of correctable errors per year averaging over 22000.

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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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/10/19/google-stress-app-test/feed/ 2 Test Your Computer With Heavy Load http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/07/test-your-computer-with-heavy-load/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/07/test-your-computer-with-heavy-load/#comments Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:17:04 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=5236 It is always a good idea to stress test a new computer or new hardware to make sure that it is fully functionally and without errors. Hardware that is not working properly can lead to all kind of problems such as system crashes, data loss and even hardware defects.

Heavy Load is putting the system and its hardware to the test including CPU, Memory and Hard Drives.“HeavyLoad writes a large test-file to the temp folder, it allocates physical and virtual memory and it draws patterns in its window.”

A chart is displaying CPU usage and free memory during the tests but the only indication that the tests have not been successful would be a crash of either the application or the system. The user has the choice to start only selected tests by enabling icons on top of the program window.

heavy load

It’s possible for instance to only stress the CPU to find out if it is working properly or the cause of problems. Experienced users prefer to use specialized applications like MemTest to test the memory of the computer instead.

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