Simulate Stress Scenarios

StressChaos Introduction

Chaos Mesh provides StressChaos experiments to simulate stress scenarios inside containers. This document describes how to create StressChaos experiments and how to prepare the corresponding configuration file.

You can create experiments using either Chaos Dashboard or the YAML configuration files.

Create experiments using Chaos Dashboard

1. Open Chaos Dashboard, and click NEW EXPERIMENT on the page to create a new experiment:

   

2. In the Choose a Target area, choose STRESS TEST and fill out the experiment information. For specific configuration fields, refer to the description in [Configuration Description](#fields description).

   

3. Fill out the experiment information, and specify the experiment scope and the scheduled experiment duration:

   

4. Submit the experiment information.

Create experiments using the YAML file

1. Write the experiment configuration to the YAML configuration file. In the following example, the memory-stress.yaml file is used.

   apiVersion: chaos-mesh.org/v1alpha1
   kind: StressChaos
   metadata:
     name: memory-stress-example
     namespace: chaos-testing
   spec:
     mode: one
     selector:
       labelSelectors:
         'app': 'app1'
     stressors:
       memory:
         workers: 4
         size: '256MB'

   This experiment configuration will create a process in the selected container, continuously allocate and read and write in memory, occupying up to 256MB of memory.

2. After the configuration file is prepared, use kubectl to create an experiment:

   kubectl apply -f memory-stress.yaml

Field description

The fields in the YAML configuration file are described in the following table:

Stressors

MemoryStressor

note

To avoid the high CPU load caused by the read and write pressure from stress-ng, Chaos Mesh uses memStress to simulate memory stress. This is because memStress simulates memory stress by consuming actual memory instead of applying the read and write pressure to memory.

CPUStressor