Stress Memory

A lightweight C program suite for stress testing system memory allocation and usage.

Overview

This project provides two command-line utilities for memory stress testing:

• stress - Allocates memory using malloc() and fills it with dummy data
• stress-file - Creates a temporary file and maps it into memory using mmap()

Both are useful for:

• Testing system memory limits
• Simulating memory-intensive applications
• Load testing in containerized environments
• Memory stress testing scenarios
• Testing different memory allocation strategies

Features

• Support for human-readable size formats (K, M, G, T suffixes)
• Cross-platform compatibility
• Lightweight and minimal dependencies
• Shared parsing logic between both programs
• Docker support for containerized testing
• Two different memory allocation approaches

Building

Prerequisites

• GCC compiler
• Make (optional, for using Makefile)

Compile with Make

# Build both programs
make

# Build only malloc version
make stress-only

# Build only file mapping version
make stress-file-only

Compile manually

# Malloc version
gcc -Wall -Wextra -std=c99 -O2 -o stress stress.c parse.c

# File mapping version
gcc -Wall -Wextra -std=c99 -O2 -o stress-file stress-file.c parse.c

Usage

Memory Allocation Version

./stress <size>

File Mapping Version

./stress-file <size>

Size Format

Both programs accept the same size parameter format:

• Plain numbers (bytes): 1048576
• With suffixes: 1M, 512K, 2G, 1T
• Optional 'B' suffix: 1MB, 512KB

Examples

# Allocate 100MB using malloc
./stress 100M

# Create and map 1GB file into memory
./stress-file 1G

# Allocate exactly 1048576 bytes
./stress 1048576
./stress-file 1048576

Program Behavior

stress (malloc version)

1. Parse and validate the size parameter
2. Allocate memory using malloc()
3. Fill the memory with dummy data ('A' characters)
4. Display confirmation message
5. Wait indefinitely (press Ctrl+C to terminate)

stress-file (mmap version)

1. Parse and validate the size parameter
2. Create a temporary file in /tmp/
3. Extend the file to the specified size
4. Fill the file with dummy data
5. Map the file into memory using mmap()
6. Touch all memory pages to load them into physical memory
7. Display confirmation message
8. Wait indefinitely (press Ctrl+C to terminate)
9. Cleanup temporary file on exit

Docker

A Dockerfile is included for containerized usage.