Stress testing for ext3?

[Herta Van den Eynde]

Christian wrote:
> On Sun, 3 Sep 2006, ..:::BeOS Mr. X:::.. wrote:
> 
>> I know of a method to continously execute a command, maybe doing a 
>> full listing of the drive's contents will heat the drives up, but I am 
>> not sure about the error checking part. Here is what I would do:
>> while [ 1 -eq 1 ]; do ls  -shw9 -R; done
> 
> 
> The directory liting will be cached, after the first run the disk should 
> not be touched any more (try it out...). Also, when you're not 
> redirecting the output to somewhere else (e.g. /dev/null), the terminal 
> displaying the output will be the bottleneck and not the fs or the disk...
> 

A colleague of mine reported he got ext3 to bail out while repeatedly 
recompiling the kernel.  He enabled all kernel modules, and then ran:

# while true; do make clean; make -j18; done

The filesystem ended up being mounted ro.  The fsck at reboot moved some 
files to lost+found, after which the filesystem could be used again.

Kind regards,

Herta

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