How to create a CPU spike with a bash command

Question

I want to create a near 100% load on a Linux machine. It\'s quad core system and I want all cores going full speed. Ideally, the CPU load would last a designated amount of

Answer 1

Although I'm late to the party, this post is among the top results in the google search "generate load in linux".

The result marked as solution could be used to generate a system load, i'm preferring to use sha1sum /dev/zero to impose a load on a cpu-core.

The idea is to calculate a hash sum from an infinite datastream (eg. /dev/zero, /dev/urandom, ...) this process will try to max out a cpu-core until the process is aborted. To generate a load for more cores, multiple commands can be piped together.

eg. generate a 2 core load: sha1sum /dev/zero | sha1sum /dev/zero