stress testing and loadavg

Michael L. Galbraith (mikeg@weiden.de)
Sun, 3 Aug 1997 07:55:48 +0200 (MET DST)


Hello,

What loadavg can a guy reasonably expect his system to handle? I keep
pushing until it either turns into a paperweight or goes ballistic..
where should I draw the line?

(2.1.47)

I ran 2 make -j's, and the load peaked at 38. That didn't seem to be very
high, so I fired up X and started running Xboard in 2 machine mode. After
starting 3 of these, one of the makes died (vfork: out of memory). I killed
the survivor, and started 4 more Xboards. This sent the machine into no-blink
swapping (load only 14). The system became so slooooow that it took minutes
for keystrokes to appear.

-Mike