How to increase CPU Utilization in Linux (CPU Spike)

There are scenarios, Where we need to test or replicate an issue in the cluster, which requires a CPU spike

For Me: I wanted to create a CPU spike to test AWS auto-scaling based on CPU utilization

Below are the two easy ways to create the CPU spike that I have used.

— Using Stress utility

Stress is a utility designed to simulate CPU stress

sudo yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

sudo yum install stress -y

Once the installation is done, We can proceed to use the tool to create stress in the CPU

stress –cpu 9 –timeout 300

CPU N -> N workers spinning. Above will use 9 cores for 300 sec

These can be tuned based on the capacity

— Use the “yes” command

“yes” command will repeatedly print the string, which is passed as an argument, causing a spike in CPU utilization. We can run multiple yes commands to max out cores.

yes > /dev/null

directly to “/dev/null” to make sure it is not printing on the console screen.

Good luck with your learning, Let us know if you have any other methods to max the CPU