Simulate load on your linux server using a one-liner

Posted by David Yahalom under Unix, Linux, General IT

Yesterday I needed a quick way to simulate load on a Linux sever. I wanted to find out that my monitoring system is working and sending alerts.

While there are many many tools that can do this, all I needed was a simple bash one-liner shell script that can make the CPUs beg for mercy.

What I ended up using is this:

dd if=/dev/zero bs=100M | gzip | gzip -d | gzip | gzip -d | gzip | gzip -d > /dev/null &

Send a few of these babies to the background and you’ll start seeing smoke coming from your server soon enough.