I want to test systems that are doing a lot of things. These things in particular are cpu usage, disk read/write, and network I/O. So I want a script to make the computer do all these things so that the average use of them all increases as much as possible. The CPU usage is easy enough I just have it adding numbers in an endless loop. However what I thought would cause the disk read/write to go up doesn't. I Have the script writing a number from a file, then writing it to a differnt file, then reading from that second file the number, then getting rid of the files and going around and around like this, but that doesn't seem to increase the average disk read/write. Also I'm not sure how to cause a lot of network I/O, should I just flood ping something and have something flood ping it?

Thanks for any help,
Michael

UPDATE: flood pinging the local loopback increases both the upload and download rates, though I'm still not sure how to get the disk activity up.

I think dd will do what you need. Have a look at the man page for it. You could read parts of the filesystem and output to /dev/null, or you could write 500 megs of junk to a file on the file system. That ought to produce disk activity

Examples (not tested):
Read from hdd:
Write to hdd:

Well I tried it out, but it doesn't seem to be raising the report of how many reads/writes in the proc directory...I wouldn't expect that it has anything to do with them being serial drives (sda, instead of hda) would it?