garbage

Garbage generator with options

Installation

        $ go get github.com/zgiles/garbage

    	$ garbage > /dev/null

There are a number of options:

-size X Specify a size ( human readable even; ex 24GiB )
-stdout Output to Stdout even if not in a pipe ( pipe works by default )
-source [aes,zero] Source of garbage, either AES garbage or all zeros ( like /dev/zero )
-output FILE Output to a file, or either "" or "-" for Stdout
-threads N Number of threads to generate data. Default is two, found to be a bit more than 1, non-linear.

Performance is in the 3-4GB/s range for garbage data:

$ ./garbage -size 64GiB | pv > /dev/null
64.0GiB 0:00:18 [3.45GiB/s]

Zero data is slighly faster:

$ ./garbage -source zero -size 64GiB | pv > /dev/null
64.0GiB 0:00:11 [5.65GiB/s]

These tests were performed on a Haswell at 3.5Ghz, the performance is largely clock-speed bound:

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep Intel | grep i7 | head -n 1 
model name      : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4770K CPU @ 3.50GHz

Zach Giles and Levi Gross co-authors. Code released under MIT License (Expat)