stress

stress is a useful tool to load your computer and stress test it with computation, IO, memory or disk work. This can be useful, for example, to examine how a CPU behaves when a different number of cores are loaded with computation.

• Installing is easy, with this funny invocation:

$ sudo apt install stress

• To load 2 CPU cores with computation work:

$ stress -c 2

• To load all the CPU cores with compute work:

$ stress -c $(nproc)

Tried with: Stress 1.0.4 and Ubuntu 15.10