Program to test CPU load and process priority

Question

I am running some test on Amazon EC2 instances and we want to make the CPU always busy at above 80%.

What I have is a program main that needs to run in high priority and I want to launch another program, preferably some math C code or a bash script that loads the CPU to over 80%.

What programs are there to use for such a task, and how to make my program run with the highest priority.

PS: Running Fedora.

Answer 1

Occupying one CPU at 100% (minus overhead) is easy in the shell:

while true; do :; done

If you want to reduce the load, introduce sleeps.

i=0; while [ $i -ne 0 ] || sleep 0.001; do i=$(( (i+1) % 10000 )); done

Tune 10000 up or down to get the desired load.

The scheduling priority is set by nice. You'll need to be root to set a higher-than-default priority. Note that a negative niceness means high-priority (a positive niceness means be nice, i.e. low priority).

nice -20 sh -c 'while …'

Answer 2

With "nice" you can control the priority. For the highest priority (only available for root):

nice -n -20 yourprogram

And for the lowest:

nice -n 19 yourprogram

If you need control also the IO, use ionice. "man nice" and "man ionice" for the documentation.