Chews up CPU and RAM. Fills the current available memory with random integers and repeatedly sorts and shuffles them. Was used to stress test some RAM modules.

nomnomnom.py

from multiprocessing import Pool, cpu_count
import random
import time
import sys
import os
import re


MEMINFO = "/proc/meminfo"

def getfreemem():
    with open(MEMINFO, "rt") as f:
        for line in f:
            if line.startswith("MemFree"):
                print line
                bits = [a.strip() for a in line.split(" ") if len(a.strip())]
                return int(bits[-2]) * 250  # MemFree is in kb


def chew(num_bytes):
    a = []
    while sys.getsizeof(a) < num_bytes and getfreemem:
        a.append(random.random())
    print "Chew:", len(a), sys.getsizeof(a), num_bytes
    while True:
        random.shuffle(a)
        a.sort()


def nomnomnom():
    num_cpus = cpu_count()
    pool = Pool(processes=num_cpus)
    free_mem = getfreemem()
    print "Free mem:", free_mem

    for i in xrange(num_cpus):
        pool.apply_async(chew, args=[free_mem / num_cpus])

    pool.close()
    pool.join()


if __name__ == '__main__':
    nomnomnom()