memload

Manual Reference Pages - MEMLOAD (1)


NAME

memload - consumes a specified amount of memory

CONTENTS

Synopsis
Description
Options
See Also
Copyright

SYNOPSIS

memload MBs-to-consume

DESCRIPTION

Memload is a small tool that can be used to allocate the desired amount of memory (specified in megabytes) to make it unavailable for the rest of the system.

In addition of just allocating the memory, memload does also initialize it with memset to ensure that the memory is actually reserved. This is neccessary because of the default Linux overcommit memory policy.

Before allocating the memory, memload process also attempts to protect itself from being OOM-killed by tweaking its own oom_adj setting. With a typical setup this will succeed only when run as root. If the adjustment fails, memload will still proceed, but may end up being killed prematurely. After the memory has been allocated and reserved, it will sleep until explicitly terminated.

OPTIONS

Currently, memload does not have actual options. It only expects the amount of memory to be consumed as its argument.

SEE ALSO

cpuload(1), ioload(1)

Files vm/overcommit-accounting and sysctl/vm.txt in kernel documentation directory for information about the overcommit policy / VM.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (C) 2007 Nokia Corporation.

This is free software. You may redistribute copies of it under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 included with the software. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.



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