Memory Stress Test
In Python, bytearray
is a mutable sequence of bytes, similar to a list but with each element representing an 8-bit byte. bytearray
objects can be used to efficiently store and manipulate binary data, such as image files or network packets.
One potential use case for bytearray
in Python is to test memory usage and confirm that monitoring systems like Zabbix, Icinga, Nagios and so on are triggering alarms when memory usage exceeds certain thresholds.
For example, the following code creates a bytearray object with a size of 1 GB:
1~ $ python
2Python 3.9.10 (main, Jan 17 2022, 00:00:00)
3[GCC 11.2.1] on linux
4Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
5>>> x = bytearray(1024*1024*1000)
If the system does not have 1 GB of free memory available, creating this object will cause the system to swap memory to disk, potentially slowing down the system and triggering alarms in monitoring systems.
It’s important to note that intentionally creating large bytearray objects like this can have negative impacts on system performance and should only be done for testing purposes in controlled environments.