Introduction to “stress” command

stress is a command-line tool available in Linux to test the performance and reliability of computer systems. It has a variety of use cases like –

• It is used by system administrators to evaluate the scalability of their system.
• It is used by kernel programmers to evaluate the performance characters of the kernel.
• It is used by systems programmers to test for classes of bugs which generally occur only when the system is under heavy load.

As per the description available for the command –

Note: this is a tool that imposes a configurable amount of CPU, memory, I/O, or disk stress on a POSIX-compliant operating system and reports any errors it detects.

In simplified terms, the command can stress the CPU, memory, I/O, or disk of the system (which is POSIX-compliant) and report any errors if detected during the stress process. Moreover, we can configure the level of stress. Also, remember that stress is not a benchmark tool (at least by intention).

Note: It is recommended to run stress with proper user privileges (using sudo) or as the root user to get the best functioning.

This article introduces stress command, a command line tool available for Linux-based operating systems to evaluate the performance and reliability of a system under a variety of workloads by introducing stress (heavy load) to the system. First, we see the introduction, then the installation, and finally usage.