CPU stress testing with "stress"

Question

I'm planning to stress test my OCed AMD Athlon X4 880K from a live session. I've heard about the "stress" tool. How is it used for CPU stress testing? I plan to monitor temps with lm_sensors. Do you know of the correct syntax to make "sensors" run in sensible intervals?

Answer 1

As the author of stress-ng, I'd personally recommend it as it has a wide range of stress tests that can be used to exercise the CPU in many different ways.

There are many ways to exercise the CPU, with stress-ng one can tell it to run all the stressors that can stress a CPU using:

stress-ng --class cpu --sequential 0 -t 60 -v

..and to check the temperatures from the thermal zone information, one can use:

stress-ng --class cpu --sequential 4 -t 60 -v --tz

The above will run the cpu class of stressors one by one (sequentially) for 60 seconds with verbose mode enabled and with thermal zone stats on 4 CPUs

Or one can run specific stressors, such as:

stress-ng --matrix 0 -t 2m

..this will run the matrix stressor for 2 minutes on all the CPUs (0 = all CPUs).

The manual with stress-ng details all the options. There are over 170 stressors to play with. To see all the stressors, use:

stress-ng --help | less

Answer 2

If you want to try using stress in TUI format, you try using s-tui. It is a terminal UI app we have created exactly for the purpose of stressing and monitoring temps.

It is available on github and on PyPi. https://amanusk.github.io/s-tui/

Installation with pip is: sudo pip install s-tui

You still need to install stress or stress-ng, but you can change the parameters from inside s-tui. The default is to run on all cores for infinite time.