Generating CPU Load with PowerShell

Placing CPU under stress with PowerShell

So I have changed a few things in one of my lab servers and needed to make sure I would not “burn” the CPU down while I am sleeping if some process gets stuck at 100%… You never know what the gremlins on your apps are going to do while you’re at sleep, so I thought “Better be safe than sorry” and although a ThreadRipper 2 is… somehow hard to overload, I decided to give it a go and load it up.

Why PowerShell?

Well, I had to go with PowerShell as my hosts are Core versions of Windows Server and hence, no graphical display support for most of the test / load CPU apps. Strangely enough this did the trick quite well. Although initially it was only charging the CPU at 50%… at a certain moment it just went ballistic and loaded the whole 48 threads to 100%.

The script…

In the search on the interwebs I found a script that actually does the whole trick and kudos to the guy that shared it here and decided to copy it here in case… you know… his blog goes away for some reason.

The code

$NumberOfLogicalProcessors = Get-WmiObject win32_processor | Select-Object -ExpandProperty NumberOfLogicalProcessors

ForEach ($core in 1..$NumberOfLogicalProcessors){ 

start-job -ScriptBlock{

    $result = 1;
    foreach ($loopnumber in 1..2147483647){
        $result=1;
        
        foreach ($loopnumber1 in 1..2147483647){
        $result=1;
            
            foreach($number in 1..2147483647){
                $result = $result * $number
            }
        }

            $result
        }
    }
}

Read-Host "Press any key to exit..."
Stop-Job * 

And that’s all you need :)

Let it rip for a few minutes and you’ll see how your CPU runs!