How to create a CPU spike with a bash command

User1 picture User1 · May 28, 2010 · Viewed 329.1k times · Source

I want to create a near 100% load on a Linux machine. It's quad core system and I want all cores going full speed. Ideally, the CPU load would last a designated amount of time and then stop. I'm hoping there's some trick in bash. I'm thinking some sort of infinite loop.

Answer

David picture David · Jun 23, 2010

I use stress for this kind of thing, you can tell it how many cores to max out.. it allows for stressing memory and disk as well.

Example to stress 2 cores for 60 seconds

stress --cpu 2 --timeout 60