# Stressant - stress testing tool

Stressant is a simple yet complete stress-testing tool that forces a computer to perform a series of test using well-known Linux software in order to detect possible design or construction failures.

Stressant builds on top of existing software and tries to cover most components of you system (currently disk, CPU and processor). It is part of the Grml Live Linux project and also packaged for Debian.

# Features

> - disk testing (with smartctl(8) and fio())
> - CPU testing (with stress-ng(1))
> - network testing (with iperf3(1))
> - designed to be ran automatically
> - supports sending reports by email or saving to disk
> - basic benchmarks (with hdparm(8) and dd(1))

See also the Design document for other planned features and remaining work.

Installation instructions are in the Installation document.

Contributions are welcome, see the Contributor’s guide document.

# Demo

# Similar software

- Phoronix test suite - far-ranging benchmarking suite
- OpenBenchmarking.org - a good source of benchmarking tools
- Inquisitor - hardware testing suite
- Breakin - stress-test and hardware diagnostics tool
- FWTS - Ubuntu’s Firmware Test Suite - performs sanity checks on Intel/AMD PC firmware. It is intended to identify BIOS and ACPI errors and if appropriate it will try to explain the errors and give advice to help workaround or fix firmware bugs
- chipsec - framework for analyzing the security of PC platforms including hardware, system firmware (BIOS/UEFI), and platform components
- sys_basher - another stress-testing tool
- PerfKit Benchmarker - GCP’s benchmarking tool
- Stressapptest - Stressful Application Test, userspace memory and IO test - similar to stressant
- `Power Stress and Shaping Tool (PSST)
    <https://01.org/power-stress-and-shaping-tool>`_ - a “controlled power tool for Intel SoC components such as CPU and GPU. PSST enables very fine control of stress function without its own process overhead”, packaged in Debian as psst
- The stress terminal (s-tui) - mostly for testing CPU, temperature and power usage, now included in the meta-package
- bench-scripts - provides a nice and simple interface for basic benchmarks

# Acknowledgements

Thanks to jrollins & dkg for writing debirf which was so useful in creating the first Stressant prototypes, and especially to dkg for help with qemu and other oddities. Thanks also to taggart for spurring this idea forward. Finally, thanks to the Grml team for being providing useful feedback on the toolset and for welcoming Stressant contributions in Grml itself.