Linux: How to put a load on system memory?

Question

I\'m working on a small function, that gives my users a picture of how occupied the CPU is.

I\'m using cat /proc/loadavg, which returns the well known 3 num

Answer 1

To eat up a fixed amount of RAM, you could just:

#include 
#include 
#define UNIX 1

//remove the above line if running under Windows

#ifdef UNIX
    #include 
#else
    #include 
#endif

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
    unsigned long mem;
    if(argc==1)
        mem = 1024*1024*512; //512 mb
    else if(argc==2)
        mem = (unsigned) atol(argv[1]);
    else
    {
        printf("Usage: loadmem ");
        exit(1);
    }

    char* ptr = malloc(mem);
    while(1)
    {
        memset(ptr, 0, mem);
        #ifdef UNIX
            sleep(120);
        #else
            Sleep(120*1000);
        #endif
    }
}

The memset() call seems to be required, because at least on OS X, the actual memory doesn't seem to get used until it is actually initialised.

EDIT: Fixed in response to comment