What are some of the ways to overwhelm powerful computer?

2 points by kingofthehills 2 years ago | 4 comments

I have Dell PowerEdge R720 with 2x 16 core CPU 192 gb of RAM running and bunch of cool stuff.

I am trying to simulate real-life traffic to this server, and I want to capture some data and overall I want to play around what ways I can break it. By traffic I mean either http, ssh or any kind of network call. Like when it breaks on the network layer, then figure different ways to do this. Then ok spin up couple Vms or docker containers with some apps running there and talking to some database. Then how much traffic can those handle, database breaks first probably. and so forth.

I am basically looking for different experiment ideas but more importantly the tools that allow such things to be done.

warrenm 2 years ago |

In what way(s) do you want to "overwhelm" this "powerful computer"?

- Network?

- CPU?

- RAM?

- Storage IO?

- Specific app(s) on the system?

- Something else?

What OS is it running?

- To "overwhelm" Windows is not always the same as to how to "overwhelm" Linux

- To "overwhelm" via virtualization (or containers) is rarely the same as with a whole device with a single dedicated OS

kingofthehills 2 years ago | |

all good points, to get started the network and the hardware components you listed (in different tests perhaps):

- CPU - RAM - Storage IO

To start of my idea would be to virtualize server with some resources, overwhelm it and see what it would it take to overwhelm a bit more resources. I am running Ubuntu 23.10.

For the next stress test, I would be looking to overwhelm an app that's connected to a Postgres database, running in a docker container on the VM. I have endpoints that write and read from the db. Same thing again here, would try to break it down, give it a bit more resources and try again. Learn things along the way. Hope that makes sense, thanks for the breakdown

gregjor 2 years ago |

It’s called load testing. Search for it, lots of tools available.

kingofthehills 2 years ago | |

I know that's how it's called, I already found that much. There are too many tools and too much information. I was looking for someone with specific examples and what worked for them.