Use all system memory in Solaris

Question

I am doing server testing and intentionally trying to crash a virtual Solaris server by using all memory. Server has a ulimit of 15 GB (several hundred GB of total system/swap memory). Is there a straight forward way of doing this using a shell/Perl script? (This is in a hardened/secured environment so the only accessable tool is Perl [and shell of course]).

Background: What is actually being tested is failover of essential processes to another server. Lately we have been having a number of processes "go out of control" and consume all system resources thus causing server to crash (separate issue). I am trying to create a simple repeatable scenario to test the response to this situation.

Answer 1

jlliagre answered the question. And posted a link to a good answer. Credit him, not me.

When you write to /tmp, in Solaris only - you are writing to RAM not to disk. This is why writes to /tmp files go super fast. Once RAM fills up the system will come to a crawl. If you completely fill /tmp, then writews to /tmp will attempt to write to swap, and eventually the system falls over. This approach bypasses ulimit for memory. Be sure you do not have a max file size specified:

ulimit -a
file(blocks)         unlimited