Stress testing a command-line application

I have a command line perl script that I want to stress test. Basically what I want to do is to run multiple instances of the same script in parallel so that I can figure out at what point our m开发者_C百科achine becomes unresponsive.

Currently I am doing something like this:

$ prog > output1.txt 2>err1.txt & \
  prog > output2.txt 2>err2.txt &
  . 
  .
  .
  .

and then I am checking ps to see which instances finished and which didn't. Is there any open-source application available that can automated this process? Preferably with a web-interface?

You can use xargs to run commands in parallel:

seq 1 100 | xargs -n 1 -P 0 -I{} sh -c 'prog > output{}.txt 2>err{}.txt'

This will run 100 instances in parallel.

For a better testing framework (including parallel testing via 'spawn') take a look at Expect.

Why not use the crontab or Scheduled Tasks to automatically run the script?

You could write something to automatically parse the output easily.

With GNU Parallel this will run one prog per CPU core:

seq 1 1000 | parallel prog \> output{}.txt 2\>err{}.txt

If you wan to run 10 progs per CPU core do:

seq 1 1000 | parallel -j1000% prog \> output{}.txt 2\>err{}.txt

Watch the intro video to learn more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpaiGYxkSuQ