stress is a tool that imposes a configurable amount of CPU, memory, I/O, or disk stress on a POSIX-compliant operating system and reports any errors it detects.
stress is not a benchmark. It is a tool used by system administrators to evaluate how well their systems will scale, by kernel programmers to evaluate perceived performance characteristics, and by systems programmers to expose the classes of bugs which only or more frequently manifest themselves when the system is under heavy load.
stress needs your help. If you are a programmer and want to help a nice project, this is your opportunity.
The original stress went unmaintained; the source of the last version, 1.0.4, was imported from Debian. After, patches from Debian and other changes were applied to create the 1.0.5 release. The details of each release are registered in the ChangeLog file. Now, stress is maintained by volunteers under Resurrecting Open Source Projects.
If you are interested in helping stress, read the CONTRIBUTING.md file.
From a Unix command line, building is simple:
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
make install
stress was originally developed by Amos Waterland apw@rossby.metr.ou.edu, under the GPL-2+ license.
The original download sites were http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~apw/stress and http://weather.ou.edu/~apw/projects/stress/
Currently, source code is maintained by volunteers. Newer versions are available at https://github.com/resurrecting-open-source-projects/stress