Stress the bandwidth and disk read in linux

Question

I need to trigger HighBandwidth and high disk read for my alert testing purpose. So does anyone knows any Linux command to trigger HighBandwidth(transmitted and received) at 70GB as well as disk read more than 50MB for testing purpose?

Answer 1

You may trigger the highest possible bandwidth by sending /dev/zero from one computer to /dev/null in a different one directly connected. You may achieve this by using socat:

in one computer:

socat - TCP-LISTEN:9999 </dev/zero

in another one connected to it:

socat TCP:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:9999 - >/dev/null

where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the IP of the other machine.

If you want to see which throughput you are having, you may use pv, which will print it:

socat TCP:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:9999 - | pv >/dev/null

Similarly you can read a very large file and discard it to /dev/null:

cat /very_large_file | pv >/dev/null

to trigger high disk read.