gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials » stress test http://www.ghacks.net A technology news blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:51:26 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Test Your PC’s Stabilityhttp://www.ghacks.net/2012/01/07/test-your-pcs-stability/ http://www.ghacks.net/2012/01/07/test-your-pcs-stability/#comments Sat, 07 Jan 2012 16:45:20 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/?p=55517 Testing a PCs stability makes sense in a number of situations. Maybe you have made the decision to overclock your PC and want to make sure that everything runs well and stable, or you are thinking of giving away your old PC to a friend or family member who is not the most knowledgeable person when it comes to computers. Making sure that the system runs fine can save you troubleshooting sessions later on.

System Stability Tester is a free open source software for Windows, Linux and Mac systems that can stress test and benchmark a computer system. It does so by calculating up to 128 million digits of Pi which is extremely taxing for the processor.

When you first start the program you have the choice to run a benchmark or system stress test. A benchmark can be used to compare the results of a system to another system, the stress test to verify that there are no calculation errors.

You can also select the amount of Pi digits you want to compute, the turns, and the number of threads the computer should use for that task.

system stability tester

The stress testing application supports two pi computation algorithms: The Quadratic Convergence of Borwein and Gauss-Legendre with Borwein being selected by default.

Please note that you can only run a stress test if at least two threads are selected. The program then starts the calculation which can slow down the PC considerable during operation. Statistics are updated regularly that display the amount of calculated Pi digits, the state, and time it took to calculate them.

An overview at the top highlights the total amount of errors of the calculation as well as the processing time until the first error was detected.

You can optionally save a log file or a Pi file. The first saves basic information about the run, the second all Pi digits.

One of the core advantages of System Stability Tester is that it is available for Mac, Linux and Windows systems, which means that it can be used to compare the performance of computers running different operating systems.

Interested users can download System Stability Tester from the developer website over at Sourcerforge.

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2012/01/07/test-your-pcs-stability/feed/ 2 Google Stress App Testhttp://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 Brinkmann 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.

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/10/19/google-stress-app-test/feed/ 2 Test Your Computer With Heavy Loadhttp://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 Brinkmann 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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