Transcending Frontiers

We’ve bought a cute little Shuttle KPC for the office. It’s a very compact PC that we’re going to use as a VOIP PBX. The bare-bone version of the machine ships with a motherboard and power supply already mounted in the case, but it lacks a CPU, memory or hard disk. Last week, for the first time in about 5 years, I built a computer. Not much has changed, though I did have a hard time mounting the CPU. It resulted in a broken fan/heat-sink assembly, though thankfully a replacement was only $20.

Today I loaded the operating system, Ubuntu Linux 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex” and got a taste of the latest Ubuntu release. As usual, I’m quite impressed, and the improvements in the two and a half years since I regularly used a graphical Linux interface are highly noticeable. There’s lots of animation and the experience is more… fun?

I thought it would be wise to stress test this little box, as even though it’s not going to get that much of a workout at our office, I wanted to make sure the CPU was seated properly and was being cooled appropriately.

The two tools I picked for the job are stress and cpuburn.

mlambie@arcee:~$ stress --cpu 16 --io 12 --vm 8 --vm-bytes 128M -d 4 --timeout 60s
stress: info: [22065] dispatching hogs: 16 cpu, 12 io, 8 vm, 4 hdd
stress: info: [22065] successful run completed in 65s

The little machine loved stress, maxing the CPU and causing the load average to skyrocket. The temperature stayed nice and chilly.

mlambie@arcee:~$ cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature
temperature:             37 C

Similarly, loading up the CPU with burnMMX only added a few extra degrees Celsius.

I’m confident that this little box will perform well under stress. What tools do you like to use to stress your Linux systems?