User manual

Validation Tests

Validation tests

(stress tests)

VAX MP source distribution provides a number of stress tests to verify the validity and integrity of VAX

MP multiprocessor operations. Supplied stress tests create parallel processes that perform various

activities stressing the system and verifying continued integrity of its operations while under stress

conditions.

These tests are contained in VAX MP distribution’s subdirectory VSMP_STRESS and are intended to be

deployed on OpenVMS to any installation directory of system administrator’s choosing.

To execute any of these tests, first ensure that system is configured with sufficient page and swap space

to support running multiple test processes. VMS command SHOW MEMORY displays the size of swap

and page files installed. We recommend minimum page file size of 500000 blocks and swap file size

100000 blocks for stress testing. Page and swap files can be enlarged with procedure

@SYS$UPDATE:SWAPFILES.COM, or by installing additional files either on the system disk or secondary

disk.

Tests should be executed under an account that has sufficient quotas. Command file

CREATE_STRESS_USER.COM creates user STRESS that has required quotas.

Executable images for the tests can be built by command file BUILD_ALL.COM.

You will typically want to use two or multiple terminals for testing and log in as STRESS on a secondary

terminal. At the same time you will increase priority of the process on your primary terminal to a high

level (such as SET PROCESS/PRIO=16) so you could run MONITOR and other tools on this terminal

unimpeded, even while stress tests launched on secondary terminal or terminals put very high load on

the system.

Some of the tests, such as disk IO tests can (and uncached IO test and possibly paging test will) generate

very high rate of disk IO with long disk queues creating a situation similar to denial-of-disk-service for

other processes. When running these tests you should expect that response time for actions relying on

disk operations, such as executing a command or launching an image, will be high on the primary

console regardless of its process priority. This is expected and “normal”

All the tests are launched with command file LAUNCH.COM file in corresponding test’s directory.

Parameters to LAUNCH.COM are specific to the test and are described below. Tests are terminated by

pressing Ctrl/Y on the terminal used to run the test. Pressing Ctrl/Y will abort all launched test sub-

processes and delete temporary work files.

I.e. to whatever extent it represents a problem, this problem exists in OpenVMS itself, rather than in VAX MP.