load testing suggestion

[Reuben D. Budiardja]

Hi all,
I have a possible hardware problem with causes some stability problem. So far 
this stability problems (crashes and locks up) are triggered when I ran rsync 
for backup-ing remote machines on a ~30- 40 GB data.

I am tring to determine if this problem only due to disk activity, which 
indicate disk related hardware problem, or something else, like CPU or 
motherboard. 

So I am trying to put this server under heavy load, to test it. Anyone have 
suggestion on how to do that? I've put things like seti @ home to run, but 
that program only eat a lot of CPU activity, and does not result in very 
heavy load (when you do "top" or "w"). The machine is a dual processor.

Second question, where can I learn more about what the "load average" in top 
or w really mean? (man top, man w doesn't really help me, or am I looking at 
wrong place) 

Thanks in advance for any suggestion.

PS: I've check for memory problem by running memtest86 on all tests, it's now 
about 80% on the last test which takes very very long, and no erros have 
showed up yet. So memory is probably not at fault, at least for now.

RDB
-- 
Reuben D. Budiardja
Department of Physics and Astronomy
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN
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