Re: CPU load testing

[Alex Hunsley <lard@tardis.ed.ac.uk>]

dman wrote:
> 
> On Sat, May 11, 2002 at 09:08:55PM -0500, Kirk Strauser wrote:
> |
> | At 2002-05-11T23:43:31Z, Scott Henson <shenson2@sandm.hn.org> writes:
> |
> | > On Sat, 2002-05-11 at 16:37, Sven Hoexter wrote:
> |
> | >> I prefer cat /dev/urandom > /dev/null
> |
> | > Dont hose your system entropy.  Try
> | >
> | >    cat /dev/zero > /dev/null
> | >
> | > same result but you still have your entropy.
> |
> | Both of those would get the CPU nice and hot, but if I'm not mistaken,
> | neither one would really exercise the FPUs or memory busses.
> 
> Right.
> 
> | Wouldn't a better test be, say, a looped Quake timedemo in
> | software-3D mode?
> 
> This will likely test your video card, if you have a decent one
> (unlike mine).
> 
> | Or perhaps Seti-at-home (doesn't it use FP vs.  integer math?) run
> | multiple times?
> 
> That sounds like a good idea.
> 
> If you want to test the memory bus, use memtest86.  It's designed for
> that :-).  (or compile a kernel, that tends to identify bad memory
> when you see gcc segfault)

Thanks to all who wrote back - lots of good ideas!

I've just discovered something new which points the finger at the net card /
network even more - when doing "ifconfig" during a copying of lots of files
over the network, I noticed the "collisions:" reading for eth0 was in the
thousands and going up constantly! A look at my hub confirmed this: the
"collision" light was flashing constantly, which assumedly shouldn't be
happening. (The other two machines can talk for ages over the network and you
never get collisions.)

alex


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