HeavyLoad
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Generic Company Place Holder HeavyLoad
HeavyLoad does its darnedest to consume all the resources on your computer and strain it to its limits. Why would you want to do that? If you're a typical business or home user, you wouldn't. If you're a programmer, however...
Very often, programming errors can "hide" due to copious system resources. A small memory leak might not be noticed. A buffer overrun can be harmless when memory is mostly empty. Then a client or user starts reporting errors on their lower-end or over-worked machines, and the developer is hard-pressed to duplicate them on their larger, more powerful, systems.
HeavyLoad helps locate these issues by basically sucking down all computer resources: running the CPU (including multiple cores) at maximum, creating a massive temporary file to strain read/write on the hard disk, and filling memory. If your program can keep performing under those constraints, it's pretty good. It's also a good way to find out "Minimum" and "Optimal" specifications.
HeavyLoad is obviously a program with fairly specialized uses, and it's not going to be run every day. However, it's freeware that performs a useful testing function, so it's worth checking out.
Note: Running this program will, obviously, result in general system performance decline.
--Ian Harac
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