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Date: Mon, 2 Jan 2006 10:06:52 -0800
From: James Long <list@museum.rain.com>
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
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Cc: Gary Kline <kline@tao.thought.org>
Subject: Re: STressing a new server...
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A buildworld is indeed an excellent test of memory, CPU, drives
and cabling.

The memory tester is sysutils/memtest.

It's not a very scientific test, but one thing I do is a 
make -j8 buildworld whilst I do a large tar operation,
optionally with compression.  Just anecdotally it appears
that tar likes to use lots of memory.  I usually do some 
sort of file system move, ala:

tar jcf - original | tar xpvf - -C copy

Make sure you have enough disk space to burn.

This has caught dodgy memory on servers in the past.


Jim