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Aug 06

How to Stress Test Your CPU in Linux

A key matrix for determining the vitality of a Linux distro, or the hardware that it runs on, is system performance. Depending on your purpose, you can choose from a variety of dedicated tools to monitor the different components such as CPU frequency, temperature and memory utilisation. But if you favour the CLI, like us, you’ll rather enjoy working with S-TUI.

With S-TUI, which is an acronym for Stress-Terminal UI, you can simultaneously monitor CPU temperature, frequency, power and utilisation. The utility presents all the information graphically and can even be used to  export the data into CSV files. Better still, you can configure S-TUI to automatically launch scripts when the values of any of the components being monitored breaches the defined threshold values. When coupled with stress, another command-line utility, S-TUI can also be used to stress-test your system.

Installing S-TUI 

Although S-TUI isn’t available in the software repositories of most popular desktop distributions, installing the tool is fairly straightforward, and the project’s GitHub page describes various installation techniques.

Using S-TUI 

At the top of the sidebar on the left are the details about your CPU. Our Lenovo test machine was correctly identified as running an Intel Core i3-5005U CPU @ 2.00GHz processor. This is because S-TUI utilises various other native tools and utilities to gather the relevant information. For instance, the same information and far more details can be ascertained from running the cat /proc/cpuinfo command.

Using S-TUI to Stress Test Your Machine 

By default, S-TUI is configured to only monitor your system. To push our machine to its limits we installed “stress” a stress testing terminal tool. Stress works with all types of CPUs, we use it to stress test Raspberry Pis as part of the stressberry Python benchmarking tool.

Saving Your Test Results 

The collected data is lost as soon as you exit S-TUI, because the tool doesn’t save it by default.

To automatically save the collected information to a timestamped CSV file when you exit S-TUI, invoke the command as so.

https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/stress-test-cpu-in-linux

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